"Callow" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his brief—witness his modest refusal to discuss in reply to a Supplementary Question the possibility of imposing a tariff in this country—suggests that somewhere behind the SPEAKER'S chair there must be a school for Under-Secretaries where the callow back-bencher is instructed in the arts and crafts required in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 3, 1920 • Various
... at that," returned the musician; "for with the callow poets of our day the way is for every one to write as he pleases and pilfer where he chooses, whether it be germane to the matter or not, and now-a-days there is no piece of silliness they can sing or write that is not set down ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... took it up suspiciously and looked at it askance. It is to be doubted if ever before he had seen a picture, unless perchance in the primary reading-book of his callow days at the public school, spasmodically opened at intervals at the "church house" in the Cove. He continued to gravely gaze at the sketch, held sideways and ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... thee, lad" was formerly a threat used to frighten children when they went a-nutting in the hazel-shaws. But we may, perhaps, take a somewhat wider view of this woodland deity and look upon him as the tutelary genius of all the young life of the forest—the callow broods of birds, the litters of foxes and squirrels, and the sapling oaks, hazels, and birches. There was a time when he was looked upon as a genial fairy, who would bring Yule-logs to the farmers on Christmas Eve and direct the woodmen in their tasks of planting and felling; latterly, ...
— More Tales of the Ridings • Frederic Moorman
... anything but open their soft beaks for the choicest little grubs to be dropped into them. It is utterly absurd (and I am afraid the members of parliament in question are quite aware they are talking nonsense) to argue from the contented squawks of a brood of these callow creatures, that full grown swallows and larks have no need of wings, and are always happiest when their ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... boometh Athwart the thicket lone: At noon the wild bee [1] hummeth About the moss'd headstone: At midnight the moon cometh, And looketh down alone. Her song the lintwhite swelleth, The clear-voiced mavis dwelleth, The callow throstle [2] lispeth, The slumbrous wave outwelleth, The babbling runnel crispeth, The hollow grot ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... said he, "listen to this touching appeal. One of the discharged counselors orders me to give him a larger pension that he may live in a manner befitting his position. Now hear the conclusion of the petition. 'Our emperor is a poor callow mouse.'" ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... Till to-night she had never received masculine attentions beyond those which might be contained in such homely remarks as 'Elfride, give me your hand;' 'Elfride, take hold of my arm,' from her father. Her callow heart made an epoch of the incident; she considered her array of feelings, for and against. Collectively they were for taking this offered arm; the single one of pique determined her to punish ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... minutes. Her mind was on the place he had touched her. She had never before experienced such a reaction. Never before had a man's hand, even on her bare flesh, produced such thrill and excitement. Desperately, her common sense struggled with this new thing. She dismissed with annoyance the callow, schoolgirl thought that this was the way love finally came—in the door, unannounced, to take over a woman's heart ...
— Ten From Infinity • Paul W. Fairman
... of you this has been a very long day. For all of you it has been a very trying day. You were all informed previously as to what we had in mind. However, since you are young and callow, and were thoroughly convinced of your own omniscience and omnipotence, it is natural enough that you derived little or no benefit from that information. You are now facing reality, ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith
... after hazarding his neck to reach the woodpecker's hole, at the triumphant moment when he thinks the nestlings his own, and strips his arm, launching it down into the cavity, and grasping what he conceives to be the callow young, starts with horror at the sight of a hideous snake, and almost drops from his giddy pinnacle, retreating down the tree with terror and precipitation. Several adventures of this kind have come to my knowledge; and one of them was attended with serious ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... exactly the role I had planned to play on the Zone. I had come rather with the hope of shouldering a shovel and descending into the canal with other workmen, that I might some day solemnly raise my right hand and boast, "I helped dig IT." But that was in the callow days before I had arrived and learned the awful gulf that separates the sacred white American from the rest of the Canal Zone world. Besides, had I not always wanted to be a policeman and twirl a club and stalk with heavy, law-compelling tread ever since I had ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... went to the instruction of others, leaving none for his own purposes. He would take callow youths to his chambers ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... the words aloud and felt warm tears over-brimming her eyes. She loved him for his extraordinary callow youth—which had carried the chaste chivalry of sixteen to the age of twice sixteen; she loved his little occasional tender gleams of womanliness. . . . And he was so easy to mystify and tease. She felt the warmth and the ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... wind up my list With Underwood, Callow, and Highley; Who bring to the medicals grist, By books on diseases ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... may be all very well," the doctor had written, "but if he is worth having he will keep! He must have the advantage of extreme youth, to be taken with a callow chick like yourself, but that shall not injure him in my eyes. Tell him to wait a while, and then come and show himself. Two heads are better than one in most of the exigencies of life, and when he comes, you and I can make up our minds about ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... Foes to the frugal kind, be far away— The titmouse and the pecker's hungry brood, And Procne with her bosom stained with blood: These rob the trading citizens, and bear The trembling captives through the liquid air, And for their callow young a cruel feast prepare. * * * * * Wild thyme and savory set around their cell, Sweet to the taste and fragrant to the smell: Set rows of rosemary with flowering stem, And let the purple violet ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... colony of metallic starlings, four or five hundred strong. The memory of man knows not the first settlement of this amicable community, which remained until during temporary absence the blacks were suborned to climb the tree to secure the eggs of the eagle. They also helped themselves to a few of the callow starlings. The sea eagles and cockatoos discarded the tree forthwith, and the starlings in a couple of years. And why? Because, in my opinion at least, the eagles had policed the tree, killing offhand any green or grey snake which had the stupidity to sneak among the nests. When the policemen ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... ideas run in—that direction? In which case, Dr. Ransford, you'll have trouble. For Mrs. Folliot, mother of yonder callow youth, who's the apple of her eye, is one of the inquisitive ladies of whom I've just told you, and if her son unites himself with anybody, she'll want to know exactly who that anybody is. You'd far better have supported me as an aspirant! However—I ...
— The Paradise Mystery • J. S. Fletcher
... he would be caught in the wake of a stickleback, and would reach the bottom spinning, or on his back. He was lucky to reach it at all. Sometimes a sunbeam's dazzling radiance would check him in mid-career, and his callow eyes would take an hour to recover. It was a month before his eyelids developed. Sometimes he would collide with others of his own kind, equally unskilled in steering, and sometimes a vague quiver in the water caused him instinctively to ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English
... no disloyalty in the thought: it was the lad's nature to give and crave affection. Only—I was different. I had never really cared about a girl before, and my life had been singularly loveless. I had fought a lonely battle always. Once before, in college, we had both laid ourselves and our callow devotions at the feet of the same girl. Her name was Dorothy—I had forgotten the rest—but I remembered the sequel. In a spirit of quixotic youth I had relinquished my claim in favor of Richey and had gone cheerfully on my way, elevated by ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... There is rarely a debate of importance in the House of Lords during which some one of the Chesterton family does not contribute his morsel of pompous imbecility, or unfold his budget of obsolete and exploded prejudices, or add his mite of curious misinformation. That such painful exhibitions of callow and contracted bigotry should so frequently be made in a body claiming for itself the finest culture and the highest civilization in Christendom is certainly a most mortifying circumstance, and serves to show ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... jade right for being so callow. How long she's been hanging upon the fellow! Such a promenading! To fair and dance parading! Everywhere as first she must shine, He was treating her always with tarts and wine; She began to think herself something fine, And ...
— Faust • Goethe
... had been so immature that even callow Tom Dixon had seemed experienced beside her. Now she was a young woman in bloom, instinctively sure of herself, even without experience to guide her. Though he had never said so, she knew quite well that this berserk of the plains had begun to love her with all the strength ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... position would have stared in incredulous amazement at the sight of this love-sick man in his intense pursuit of a girl who was able to twist him around her little finger and make him follow her about as if he were a green and callow youth. Palgrave, the lady-killer; Palgrave, the egoist; Palgrave, the superlative person, who, with nonchalant impertinence, had picked and chosen. Was ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... how, in the fire of his callow youth and fine flower of his lustie springal days, he had been stung with murderous frenzie at view of a certaine picture of Apelles, the which in those times was showed in a temple. And the said picture did present Alexander the Great ...
— The Merrie Tales Of Jacques Tournebroche - 1909 • Anatole France
... forsooth, herself no wider than before. It is not enough that we have edified her a pedestal and perform impossible rites in celebration of her altitude and distinction. It does not suffice that with never a smile we assure her that she is the superior sex—a whopper by the repetition whereof certain callow youth among us have incurred the divine vengeance of belief. It does not satisfy her that she is indubitably gifted with pulchritude and an unquestionable genius for its embellishing; that Nature has endowed her with a prodigious knack at accroachment, whereby ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... inquiry from a bystander, I understood that the performance was taken from Mr TERRISS'S Adelphi Theatre, which I had heard was conspicuous for excellence in fierce combats, blood-curdling duels, and scenes in court. And I narrated to him how I too, when a callow and unfledged hobbardyhoy, had engaged in theatrical entertainments, and played such parts in native dramas as heroic giant-killers and tiger slayers, in which I was an "au fait" and "facile princeps," also in select scenes from SHAKSPEARE'S play of Macbeth in English ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... fierce March weather White waves break tether, And whirled together At either hand, Like weeds uplifted, The tree-trunks rifted In spars are drifted, Like foam or sand, Past swamp and sallow And reed-beds callow, Through pool and shallow, To wind and lee, Till, no more tongue-tied, Full flood and young tide Roar down the ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... his second cigarette when he caught sight of the plush-framed photograph. He stared till his match went out, and rising, crossed the room. As he scrutinized the likeness of his callow self, he gave way to laughter, his first spontaneous expression of feeling ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... meanin',' resooms Cherokee, 'let me onbosom myse'f as to what happens a party back in Posey County, Injeanny. I'm plumb callow at the time, bein' only about the size an' valyoo of a pa'r of fives. but I'm plenty impressed by them events I'm about to recount, an' the mem'ry is fresh enough for yesterday. But to come flutterin' from my perch. Thar's a sport who makes his home- camp in that hamlet which fosters ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... with the girl pupils of the Vermont academy, and kept them from the shy advances of the local swains. She smiled—a little sadly—as the thought occurred to her that after this interval of years it was again her business to restrain the callow affections. Should she never have the matchmaking instincts of her sex; never become the trusted confidante of youthful passion? Young Calton had not confessed his passion to HER, nor had Frida revealed her secret. Only the elder ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... a boy of twenty-two, convalescing in country lodgings after an illness that seemed to have taken the marrow out of my bones. Hilaire was in Japan, and I—a callow fledgling from the nest—was very sick and sorry for myself. There were some people living in rather a large house at the other end of the village who took notice of me. They were the only ones, and I have thought since that my acquaintance with them really did for me with everyone ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... at Paragot's attire. He looked like a tenth-rate French provincial actor made up to represent a duke, and in a country where none but actors and footmen are clean-shaven this likeness was the more accentuated. Also the difference between Paragot hairy and bearded and Paragot in his present callow state was that between an old unbroken hazel nut and ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... Aunt Georgiana had been a music teacher at the Boston Conservatory, somewhere back in the latter sixties. One summer, while visiting in the little village among the Green Mountains where her ancestors had dwelt for generations, she had kindled the callow fancy of the most idle and shiftless of all the village lads, and had conceived for this Howard Carpenter one of those extravagant passions which a handsome country boy of twenty-one sometimes inspires in an angular, spectacled woman of thirty. When she returned to her duties in Boston, Howard ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... of life. All were kind to me. I was well mentally and physically. I was in the bud of youth. I was like the pink rhodoras in spring, callow of leaf or fruit but brightly covered with promising blossoms. There remained one thing for me—to know I was happy. Did I know it? Yes, I did. I realized it then as now. I was not a victim of unconscious joy, to awaken to it at some future period. It was not to me a dream. The cup was full! ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... at his watch. "Your monument up there is fast. I'll be here with a cab at eight. I'm anxious to meet him. You've given me the strangest idea of his callow innocence ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... truer to call Mr. Tarkington's plots sophomoric than to call them adolescent. Indeed, the mark of the undergraduate almost covers them, especially of the undergraduate as he fondly imagines himself in his callow days and as he is foolishly instructed to regard himself by the more vinous and more hilarious of the old graduates who annually come back to a college to offer themselves—though this is not their ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... worse, for he asked questions without number and when at last I was reduced to silence, lectured me about shooting. Yes, this callow youth who was at Sandhurst, instructed me, Allan Quatermain, how to kill elephants, he who had never seen an elephant except when he fed it with buns at the Zoo. At last Mr. Smith, who to Scroope's great amusement had taken the end of the table and assumed the position of host, ...
— The Ancient Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... He felt like a boy reading his first attempts at original poetry to an established critic. What would this master cracksman, this polished wielder of the oxy-acetylene blow-pipe, this expert in toxicology, microscopy and physics think of his callow outpourings! ...
— The Intrusion of Jimmy • P. G. Wodehouse
... a great roar of laughter, for the clumsy leap resulted in two of the callow birds being jerked out heavily into the bottom of the ditch, and upon their recovery one was ...
— First in the Field - A Story of New South Wales • George Manville Fenn
... may read early resolutions ineffaceably inscribed upon them. But the irony of it! Here was Millard, for example, a mature man of affairs, held to a scheme of life adopted almost by accident when he was but just tottering, callow, from his up-country nest. What a haphazard world is this! Draw me no Fates with solemn faces, holding distaffs and deadly snipping shears. The Fates? Mere children pitching heads and tails ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... shall not soothe his slumber That a lock of his brown hair his father aye shall keep; For the last, he nothing grudgeth, it shall nought his quiet cumber, That in a golden mesh of HIS callow ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... Lady Maud imagined this extraordinary document to be a stupid practical joke, invented by some half-fledged cousin to tease her. She had a good many cousins, among whom were several beardless undergraduates and callow subalterns in smart regiments, who would think it no end of fun to scare 'Cousin Maud.' There was no mistaking the official paper on which the document was written, and it bore the seal of the Chancery ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... Here I'll lay me down and dream An hour away amongst these violets! O my heart joys to gaze upon the sky Gleaming athwart green leaves, like happiness Above the gloom and shadow of the world! Then, thought first feels its attribute divine, And like a callow eagle spreads its wings, And makes its rest amid the lumin'd heavens. The lark sings poized above me in the sun, Like Moslem in his gilded minaret Calling the faithful unto matin prayer. There would my spirit ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... face and eyes framed in fur cap and boa. Afterwards he stood making a study of the ground, and answering her remarks in his usual stumbling fashion. What was it had gone out of her voice—simply the soft callow sounds of first youth? And what a personage she had grown in these twelve months—how formidably, consciously brilliant in look ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... him, and he lay beneath, Hushed as the babe upon its mother's breast, Drooped as the willow when no winds can breathe, Lulled like the depth of Ocean when at rest, Fair as the crowning rose of the whole wreath, Soft as the callow cygnet in its nest;[bp] In short, he was a very pretty fellow, Although his woes had turned him ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... of twenty, or, perhaps, of twenty-one or two. Her eyes were the obtrusive feature of her face, and she used them with a freedom which held callow youth spellbound. Her gown was more pretentious than that of her more elderly companion. This, of course, was justified by the difference between their ages; but there seemed to be, beyond this, a flaunting gayety about it and her manner which were not, in the eyes ...
— In Old Kentucky • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... last days at the plough, and they made that field memorable to me. I never cross it now but I see myself there—a callow youth being jerked by the plough-handles but with my head in a cloud of alluring day-dreams. This, I think, was in the fall of 1853. I went to school that winter with a view to leaving home in the spring to try my luck at school-teaching in ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... bare, and the tiny quills of the young wings only showed a little grey sprouting feather, as did the breast some primrose-coloured down. Miss Fosbrook had to part with some favourite cockney notions of the beauty of infant birds, and on the other hand to gain a vivid idea of what is meant by "callow young." ...
— The Stokesley Secret • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Henry so amiable. In fact he seemed hard put to it to keep from unrestrained merriment, and Tom, who found the affair more alarming as it progressed, would have preferred avoiding him altogether. He knew that Henry was calling him callow, a lightweight, charges well-nigh proved by his present undertaking, and to save himself from rout he had to remember that Henry was a heavy Grave man and that his own participation was only a question of common courtesy to ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... passed unnoticed, amongst the rest is a Spanish artist named Villa amil, whose interiors are far above mediocrity, and who has given us some rich specimens of Spanish monuments, which are now admirably illustrated in a periodical lithographic work. Our countrymen, Messrs. Callow and Barker, have also sent several pieces, which do them and their country credit, the former, some beautiful subjects in water colours, and the latter of varied descriptions, in some of which the game ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... humour of her own in spite of her demure looks, laughed at the dejection and martyrdom of Sir Harry; and taking the eagerly-proffered arm of a callow lieutenant, ostentatiously and hopelessly in love with her, went away to play her part of deputy hostess. She moved from group to group, and everywhere received smiles and congratulations, for she was a general favourite, and, with the exception of Mrs Pansey, everyone approved of her ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... knowing the strength and the nature and the inmost depths of the Russian genius, can by a single magic incantation divert our ideals to the higher life? Were there such a man, with what tears, with what affection, would not the grateful sons of Russia repay him! Yet age succeeds to age, and our callow youth still lies wrapped in shameful sloth, or strives and struggles to no purpose. God has not yet given us the man able to sound ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... or swimmes, And seems a moving Land, and at his Gilles Draws in, and at his Trunck spouts out a Sea. Mean while the tepid Caves, and Fens and shoares Thir Brood as numerous hatch, from the Egg that soon Bursting with kindly rupture forth disclos'd Thir callow young, but featherd soon and fledge 420 They summ'd thir Penns, and soaring th' air sublime With clang despis'd the ground, under a cloud In prospect; there the Eagle and the Stork On Cliffs and Cedar tops thir Eyries build: Part loosly wing the Region, part more ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... no longer callow; comely, yet with a strong male comeliness; he had a pleasantly modulated voice, yet one that they had heard swell into a compelling note of command; he had the most joyous, careless laugh in all the world—such a laugh as ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... he argued that it was absurd that such a passion as his towards a woman of whom he had seen so little should be genuine. His condition had made him mawkishly sentimental. He had been fascinated like a callow youngster by her delicate, pretty features; by her deep gray eyes, her budding lips, her gentle voice. He would be writing verse next. He was free—free, and in one stroke he had placed the world at his feet. He was above ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... looking worn and jaded from long hours at the desk, she had ever a comforting supper and smiling, playful welcome for her lord, making much of him before the assembled company, to the end that more than one callow sub was heard to say that there would be some sense in marrying, by George, if a fellow could pick up a wife like Mrs. Frank. All the same the post soon learned that the supposedly blest aide-de-camp breakfasted ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King
... and women who recited long and dreary poems at evening parties, and callow youths who walked about the streets late at night, playing concertinas, he used to get together and poison in batches of ten, so as to save expense; and park orators and temperance lecturers he used to shut up six in a small room with a glass of water and ...
— Told After Supper • Jerome K. Jerome
... that just as she caught herself smiling a little, down inside, over his callow absurdity, she reflected that a year ago they had been equals; that, as far as actual intelligence went, he was no doubt her equal to-day—her superior, perhaps. He'd gone on studying and she hadn't. Except for the long-circuited sex attraction that Doctor Randolph had been talking about last night, ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... the best hours of her lonely child-life were spent. Within the house, everything, she says, was socially utilitarian; her books told of a proud world, but in another temper were the teachings of the little garden, where her thoughts could lie callow in the nest, and only be fed and kept warm, not called to fly or sing before the time. A range of blue hills, at about twelve miles' distance, allured her to reverie, and bred within her thoughts not too deep for tears. The books which exercised most power ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 438 - Volume 17, New Series, May 22, 1852 • Various
... moment. He saw her as middle-aged. He studied the wrinkles in the softness of her throat, the slack flesh beneath her chin. The taut muscles of her youth were loose and drooping. Between dances she sat in the largest chair, waving her cigarette, summoning her callow admirers to come and talk to her. ("She thinks she's a blooming queen!" growled Babbitt.) She chanted to Miss Sonntag, "Isn't my little studio sweet?" ("Studio, rats! It's a plain old-maid-and-chow-dog flat! Oh, God, I wish I was home! ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... pass that the pick of the men were posted, because, as fast as a callow youth gets worth marrying, somebody promptly marries him. The Fast Young Married Crowd was a closed corporation and played exclusively within itself; the female of the species had to compete only with females of ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... the marriage ceremony so often that she could say it backwards, never forgetting to cross her fingers before saying, "Until death do us part." The Proprietor drew the Stranger's attention to the group before the cage, a mischievous smile on his face as he looked over the half dozen of callow youths who are always in the train of ...
— Side Show Studies • Francis Metcalfe
... although it is getting to be what it never was, it must always remain what it now is. It might be called a city, if it were not alternately populous and uninhabited; and it would be a wide-spread village, if it were not a collection of hospitals for decayed or callow politicians. It is the hybernating-place of fashion, of intelligence, of vice,—a resort without the attractions of waters either mineral or salt, where there is no bathing and no springs, but drinking in abundance ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... are the company who rents offices, the cigar man, the lunch man, and the telegraph operators, and the commission men who get one-eighth of a cent a bushel either way the market goes. Some of these commission men get the speculation bug and go broke, and yet there are callow youths and business men and clerks and other outsiders who believe they are smart enough to speculate on the Board of Trade. That belief ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... window and stood there, looking out upon the passers-by in the street below. One and all seemed callow souls who had met neither angel nor devil, heard neither the thunderbolt nor the still small voice. Desperately weary, set to a task which appalled him, he felt again the sting of a lash to which he had thought himself inured. There was a longing upon him that this insistent probing of his wound ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... and crushing or scattering them from the path of his swift and victorious despair, the Emperor at last is at home,—where are the great dignitaries and the lieutenant-generals of the empire? Where is Maria Louisa, the Empress Eagle, with her little callow king of Rome? Is she going to defend her nest and her eaglet? Not she. Empress-queen, lieutenant-general, and court dignitaries, are off on the wings of all the winds—profligati sunt, they are away with the money-bags, and Louis Stanislas Xavier rolls ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... called out of my bed, and waked for the purpose, in the coldest winter nights—and this not once, but night after night—in my shirt, to receive the discipline of a leathern thong, with eleven other sufferers, because it pleased my callow overseer, when there has been any talking heard after we were gone to bed, to make the six last beds in the dormitory, where the youngest children of us slept, answerable for an offence they neither dared to commit, nor had the power to hinder.—The same ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... persons—the first when they are anxious to be interviewed, the second when people are anxious to interview them. With some there thus arrives a third period, in which they are anxious not to be interviewed, but this is rare. Doubtless there are superior persons who never craved for fame even in their callow youth, and possibly Ouida herself may have taken to authorship as an elaborate means of diverting attention from herself. But the majority of mortals, being fools by edict of Puck and Carlyle, are pleased ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... an ingenuous lad, with the callow simplicity of a theological college still untouched, and had arrived on the preceding Monday at the Free Kirk manse with four cartloads of furniture and a maiden aunt. For three days he roamed from room to room in the excitement of householding, ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... holding Mr Clennam's card in his hand, had a youthful aspect, and the fluffiest little whisker, perhaps, that ever was seen. Such a downy tip was on his callow chin, that he seemed half fledged like a young bird; and a compassionate observer might have urged that, if he had not singed the calves of his legs, he would have died of cold. He had a superior eye-glass dangling round his neck, but unfortunately had such flat orbits ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... know," was the categorical answer. "Rawdon brought the parson out from Omaha, and the Osborns gave her away. Of Lowndes I've seen nothing since the night you staked him at Laramie, and what I've heard of him you refused to listen to. Of that callow specimen of the effete and ultra-refined Back Bay District you've long since had my opinion. He's too good and gentle for this Western world of ours, Bob, and he and his shuddering kinsfolk suffer too much ...
— Lanier of the Cavalry - or, A Week's Arrest • Charles King
... pines, that fringed the craggy ledge High over the blue gorge, and all between The snowy peak and snow-white cataract Fostered the callow eaglet;" ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... is the readiness with which the American newspaper tumbles to these frauds. The yellow press especially luxuriates in them; woodcuts the callow bedizened bride, the jaded game-worn groom; dilates upon the big money interchanged; glows over the tin-plate stars and imaginary garters and pinchbeck crowns; and keeping the pictorial paraphernalia in cold but not forgotten storage waits for the inevitable scandal, and then, with lavish exaggeration, ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... Callow—a spinney of silver birches and larches that topped a round hill. A purple mist hinted of buds in the tree-tops, and a fainter purple haunted the vistas between the silver and ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... to make friends, and encouraged young men generally to meet them; but there was something in the appearance of this callow Italian nobleman that stamped his character as artificial and insincere. He resolved to find out something about his antecedents before he permitted the young fellow to establish friendly relations ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... was a callow youth of sixteen, whose father had met with a sudden wave of prosperity and was now trying to sell his rather modest home that he might move to a more exclusive neighborhood. The son was inclined to patronize old ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... not want to laugh, but when Mr. Wilbur, who looked scarcely older than himself, and was in appearance but a callow youth, referred to himself as a man of experience he ...
— The Errand Boy • Horatio Alger
... puberty, pucelage^. prime of life, flower of life, springtide of life^, seedtime of life, golden season of life; heyday of youth, school days; rising generation. Adj. young, youthful, juvenile, green, callow, budding, sappy, puisne, beardless, under age, in one's teens; in statu pupillari [Lat.]; younger, junior; hebetic^, unfledged. Phr. youth on the prow and pleasure at the helm [Gray]; youth a the glad season of ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... generally; past huge bat caves and the big nests of pack-rats, tucked under shelves of Nature's making; past stratified millions of crumbling seashells that tell to geologists the tale of the salt-water ocean that once on a time, when the world was young and callow, filled this hole brim full; and presently, when you have begun to piece together the tattered fringes of your nerves, you realize that the canyon is even more wonderful when viewed from within than it is when viewed from without. ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... against a window in which there were strong iron bars. For a long time he lay there wondering where he could be and how he came to be in this unfamiliar place. There was a racking pain in his head, a weakness in his limbs that alarmed him. Once, in his callow days, he had been intoxicated. He recalled feeling pretty much the same as he felt now, the day after that ribald supper party at Maxim's. Moreover, he had a vague recollection of iron bars but no such ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... my callow meditations. My course of reasoning was perhaps faulty, but then there are, at twenty-one, many processes more interesting and desirable than the perfecting of a mathematical demonstration. And so, for a little, my blood rejoiced with a ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... who for his other sins Had liv'd amongst the Jacobins; Though like a kitten amid rats, Or callow tit in nest of bats, He much abhorr'd all democrats; 5 Yet nathless stood in ill report Of wishing ill to Church and Court, Tho' he'd nor claw, nor tooth, nor sting, And learnt to pipe God save the King; Tho' each day did new feathers bring, 10 All swore he had a leathern ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... in Goshen, and trained it for mature national life by its varied desert experiences. As one of the prophets puts the same idea, 'I taught Ephraim to go,' where the figure of the parent bird training its callow fledglings for flight is exchanged for that of the nurse teaching a child to walk. While, then, the text primarily refers to the experience of the infant nation in the forty years' wanderings, it carries large truths about us all; and sets forth the true meaning and importance ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... we do we shall put Bishop Mant's "Months" in our pocket. The good Bishop—who must have been an indefatigable bird-nester in his boyhood—though we answer for him that he never stole but one egg out of four, and left undisturbed the callow young—treats of those beauteous and wondrous structures in a style that might make Professor Rennie jealous, who has written like a Vitruvius on the architecture of birds. He expatiates with uncontrolled delight on the unwearied activity of the ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... thus afford to be amused at the ebullitions of jealousy that rolled so ominously into the young hearts of the chums. "Black as thunderclouds were their faces," he said, "as they saw these sweet young ladies, whom they in their callow affections would already wholly monopolise, kissed by a dozen ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young
... hitherto, with no great prospect or hopes of success. As for what you mention of entering into Holy Orders, it is indeed a great work; and I am pleased to find you think it so, as well as that you do not admire a callow clergyman any more ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... to discuss it since it hasn't been announced, but I thought you knew." He nodded toward the group of callow youths who surrounded Angelica. "It's an open secret that he's going ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... roses deck, Lead their young trains amid the cumberous wreck; And, slowly purpling o'er the mighty waste, 190 Plant the fair growths of Science and of Taste. While each light Moment, as it dances by With feathery foot and pleasure-twinkling eye, Feeds from its baby-hand, with many a kiss, The callow nestlings ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... world not to believe Luther's tales about the city of Rome. Luther, they say, came to Rome as a callow rustic comes to a metropolis. To the wily Italians he was German Innocence Abroad; they hoaxed him by telling him absurd tales about the Popes, the priests, the wonders of the city, etc., and the credulous monk believed all they told him. He left Rome with his faith in the Church unimpaired. Later ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... rejoined, with a laugh. "She's a lady I've a high opinion of; in fact, I'm a little afraid of her. Though I'm nearly as old as she is, she makes me feel callow. It's a sensation ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... retorted Marchmont, "that are neither indecent nor political, and expect 'em to succeed. Callow youth! Well, I must be off to the office. I've some copy up my sleeve, and if it's a go it'll give your book the biggest boom a ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... the only secret upon which any secret society holds a caveat. Wisdom can not be corraled with gibberish and fettered in jargon. Knowledge is one thing—palaver another. The Greek-letter societies of our callow days still survive in bird's-eye, and next to these come the Elks, who take theirs with seltzer and a smile, as a rare good joke, save that brotherhood and good-fellowship are actually a saving salt which excuses much that would otherwise ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... dangerous to the soul than Aphrodite's kisses or Anacreon's drunken song. By such arts did Cleopatra win the master spirit of the world and make the mailed warrior her doting slave, indifferent alike to honor and to duty, content but to live and love. What wonder that the callow shepherd lad, unskilled in woman's wile, believed that his mistress loved him?— that his heart went out to the handsome coquette in a wild, passionate throb in which all Heaven's angels sang and Hell's ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... were at once pounced on by Leopold Lincoln Bunn, the local reporter, a callow youth aflame with the chance for a big story of ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... somewhat distantly; and with feelings which it would be hard to describe, Ben recognized the tall, rather callow youth as the Rutherford who stoned him several years before, when he was floating down the river on a log, and to whom Ben in turn had given ...
— The Telegraph Messenger Boy - The Straight Road to Success • Edward S. Ellis
... Heavens! to think of being held in such bondage! I could stand it with more patience if I were in prison sharing the hard lines of the fellows. But to be here; to be hand in glove with these boasting, audacious coxcombs, and forced to listen to their callow banter of us and our army, it makes me feel like a sneak and a traitor, and I'm glad that I ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... the glory of Covent Garden Ball had departed. It may be so. Yet the floor, with its strange conglomeration of music-hall artists, callow university men, shady horse-dealers, and raucous military infants, had an atmosphere of more than meretricious gaiety. The close of an old year and the birth of a ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... My first master in this line was M. Barbier, the father of Jules Barbier, the poet and librettist, who, with Emile Augier, was a class-mate of my young brothers. I did watercolours too, under an Englishman, William Callow, and oils in Gudin's studio. But my real master, who taught me to draw, and led and guided me, and gave me my taste for things artistic, was Ary Scheffer, with whom I remained on terms of the closest ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... gradually become "specialists," like other professional persons in the respectable walks of life. It may be safely said, however, that a thief in one thing is a thief in all things. He would be callow, indeed, who would predicate that a professional burglar would hesitate to commit highway robbery because his weapon was a jimmy, or that a panel thief would turn up his nose at picking an inviting pocket. It is all in the line of business, ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... point, and would not hear of a clerical housekeeper for her laddie. Margaret Meiklewham—a woman of a severe countenance, and filled with the spirit of the Disruption—who had governed the minister of Pitscowrie till his decease, and had been the terror of callow young probationers, offered herself, and gave instances ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... the betrothed damsels, that they should tarry with her for the space of one year, in order more fully to learn their household duties, and to strengthen them in the practice of the Christian virtues; seeing that they were still, as the duchess said, as ignorant as callow geese! Moreover, their clothes and furniture had to be provided, and the like. But ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... forth (as from the deep home-grove The father Songster plies the hour-long quest) To feed his soul-brood hungering in the nest; But his warm Heart, the mother-bird above Their callow fledgling progeny still hove With tented roof of wings and fostering breast Till the Soul fed the soul-brood. Richly blest From Heaven their growth, whose food was ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... follow that because I can sell hundreds of thousands of... you know what... that I can sell anything I've a mind to sign." I said it, confident that she had not lived all those years with her brother without having learned the axiomatic nature of it. To my discomfiture, she began to talk like a callow student. ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... to that of his son, was erected "to record his worth both in his public and private character, and as a mark of personal esteem—p. 1. F.H. and W.C. p.c." I am told that these initials stand for F. Hustle, and the Rev. William Callow, and that the latter was the author of the following lines inscribed on the monument, which are ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... delicate appreciation of classic models, but give no hint of the author of a new style in poetry. Pope's youthful pieces have all the sing-song, wholly unrelieved by the glittering malignity and eloquent irreligion of his later productions. Collins' callow namby-pamby died and gave no sign of the vigorous and original genius which he afterward displayed. We have never thought that the world lost more in the "marvellous boy," Chatterton, than a very ingenious imitator of obscure and antiquated dulness. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Highness; but like eagles, his thoughts were first callow; yet, born plumeless, they came ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... life, you grant that. Therefore, the person of experience is the person who really lives. (Of course I admit exceptions.) Therefore, the society of a woman of sixty—an intelligent woman—is infinitely more to be desired than that of a callow girl with nothing but eyes and theories. It is profitable, it is delightful; and this with no hurrying of the heart, no upsetting of the nerves, none of the deplorable symptoms that I observe annually in my friend ...
— Geoffrey Strong • Laura E. Richards
... potent wish in the productive hour Calls to its aid Imagination's power, O'er embryon throngs with mystic charm presides, And sex from sex the nascent world divides, 120 With soft affections warms the callow trains, And gives to laughing Love his nymphs and swains; Whose mingling virtues interweave at length The mother's ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... marked, with ravenous eyes, Where wrapped in down the callow songsters lay; Then rushing, rudely seized the glittering prize. And bore it ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... is blowing for each so narrow like head of an arrow is only a barrow to carry the mud he makes from the nicest water flowing and the nicest dust that is blowing to build his nest for her he loves best with the nicest cakes which the sunshine bakes all for their merry children all so callow with beaks that follow gaping and hollow wider and wider after their father or after their mother the food-provider who brings them a spider or a worm the poor hider down in the earth so there's no dearth for their beaks as yellow as the buttercups growing ...
— At the Back of the North Wind • George MacDonald
... vigour and freshness, which should have been stored up for the purposes of the hard struggle for existence in practical life, have been washed out of them by precocious mental debauchery—by book gluttony and lesson bibbing. Their faculties are worn out by the strain put upon their callow brains, and they are demoralised by worthless childish triumphs before the real work of life begins. I have no compassion for sloth, but youth has more need for intellectual rest than age; and the cheerfulness, the tenacity of purpose, the power of ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... conservative formalism is even dangerous to his originality, because they try to melt him along with all the other students and pour him into their one mold. It is distressing to think of all the sums now devoted to inducing callow, overdriven sophomores to compose forced essays and doggerel, by luring them on with the glitter of cash prizes. One shudders to think of all the fellowship money which is now being used to finance reluctant ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... begins. There were two remarkable cases given; one, the child who climbed upon my knee to amaze and upset me by her pessimistic remarks about life; the second, my little friend Nesta— that was her name and she is still on my visiting list—who revealed her callow mind striving to grasp an abstract idea—the idea of time apart from some visible or tangible object. Now these two were aged five years; but what shall we say of the child, the little girl-child who steps out of the cradle, so to speak, as a being ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... misunderstood, though he was not. Posing as 'Velvet Coat' among the slums, he did no good to himself. He had not the Dickens aptitude for depicting the ways of life of his adopted friends. When with refined judgment he wanted a figure for a novel, he went back to the Bar he scorned in his callow days and then drew ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... Chirping, in the cold and rain, Their impatient sweet complaining, Sing out from their hearts again; Bid them set themselves to mating, Cooing love in softest words, Crowd their nests, all cold and empty, Full of little callow birds. ...
— Required Poems for Reading and Memorizing - Third and Fourth Grades, Prescribed by State Courses of Study • Anonymous
... Ulsters and sailor hats were appropriate enough then, but the genders were not easy to distinguish, especially as the elder girl wears her hair short—no improvement to a keen face which needs softening. She is much too like a callow undergraduate altogether, and her sister follows suit, though perhaps with more refinement of feature—indeed she looks delicate, and was soon called in. They are in slight mourning, and appear in gray serges. ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and arrived at the theater rather late. The audience was brilliant; indeed, though I had been an ardent first-nighter for a year or two in my callow youth, I think I have never seen such a representation of fashion and genius in America, except at ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout
... don't hev the leadin' part to-day," she thought disappointedly, as a callow youth, whose hair was pompadoured and whose chin receded, began to read the lessons for the day. Amarilly was kept in action by her effort to follow the lead of the ...
— Amarilly of Clothes-line Alley • Belle K. Maniates
... not a spark of sympathy for Harry—a callow, egotistical dealer in currants. He ought to have blown out his brains a year ago. He has behaved in a most unconscionable manner. How does he expect me to break the news to Carlotta? His selfishness is appalling. There he lies, comfortably ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... savage into which he throws whatever he kills with his little poisoned arrows or fishes out of the river. Probably my only quarrel with them would be about the little fledgelings: it angers me to see them beating the bushes in spring in search of small nesties and the callow young that are in them. After all, the gipsies could retort that my friends the jays and magpies are at the same business ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... gracious mother's wiles And dear delusive smiles! No callow fledgling of her singing brood But tastes that witching food, And hearing overhead the eagle's wing, And how the thrushes sing, Vents his exiguous chirp, and from his nest Flaps forth—we know the rest. I own the weakness of the tuneful kind,— Are not all harpers blind? I sang too early, ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... some date unknown. All the shifting and changing which Cervantes made in these embarrassed years are within a small half-circle, whose centre is his grave and the cell of his child. He fluttered about that little convent like a gaunt old eagle about the cage that guards his callow young. ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... callow and awkward ways of a young giraffe, but, though only a three-year-old, he was sedate as an old maid and had the dignity of a churchwarden. His behaviour was an example to ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... the result of an immediate impulse to imitation felt irresistibly on the reading of Sterne's narrative. That the critics and readers of that day treated with serious consideration the efforts of a callow youth of twenty or twenty-one in this direction is indicative either of comparative vigor of execution, or of prepossession of the critical world in favor of the literary genre,—doubtless of both. Schummel confesses that the desire to write came directly after the book had been read. ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... hear me yet before I die. They came, they cut away my tallest pines, My dark tall pines, that plumed the craggy ledge 205 High over the blue gorge, and all between The snowy peak and snow-white cataract Foster'd the callow eaglet—from beneath Whose thick mysterious boughs in the dark morn The panther's roar came muffled, while I sat 210 Low in the valley. Never, never more Shall lone Oenone see the morning mist Sweep thro' them; ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... still he gave; And all his gifts, though small, yet spoke his love. He picked the earliest strawberries in woods, The clustered filberds, and the purple grapes; He taught a prating stare to speak my name; And, when he found a nest of nightingales, Or callow linnets, he would show them me, And let me ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... Street. Every one is mad. Servants, lawyers, hod carriers, merchants, old maids, widows, mechanics, sly wives, thieving clerks, and the "demi-monde," all throng to the portals of the "Big Board." It is a money-mania. Beauty, old age, callow boyhood, fading manhood, all chase the bubble values of ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... for the work—that must be the ideal of the Church, that man and no other, whatever be the consequence in the way of offending well-to-do supporters whose dream it has been that son of theirs shall "wag his head in a pu'pit," whatever be the disappointment caused to the uninspired ambitions of callow youth or the conceit of later years. The pulpit is not for sale! The honour of standing there is not to be dispensed as a reward or allowed as a compliment. Wealth has no rights and poverty no disabilities as to the occupancy ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... replied with a chuckle. "He looks like an amateurish and very callow Raffles. He's in ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... isolated act of deviltry and daring of the sharp-winged pirate of the sky, a sudden assertion of over-mastering energy and power, and a very slight offence compared with that of the crow when he carries off and devours his callow little cousins ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... began when he was about three years old; that is to say, he was gathered under the wings of one of those good old motherly dames, found in every village, who cluck together the whole callow brood of the neighborhood, to teach them their letters and keep them out of harm's way. Mistress Elizabeth Delap, for that was her name, flourished in this capacity for upward of fifty years, and it was the pride and boast of her declining days, when nearly ninety years of age, that she ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... degringolade! The great career I had mapp'd out for me— Nipp'd i' the bud. What life, when I come out, Awaits me? Why, the very Novices And callow Postulants will draw aside As I pass by, and say 'That man hath done Time!' And yet shall I wince? The worst of Time Is not in having done it, ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm
... Eric met some callow, check-shirted, bare-legged lad on horseback, or a shrewd-faced farmer in a cart, who nodded and called out cheerily, "Howdy, Master?" A young girl, with a rosy, oval face, dimpled cheeks, and pretty dark eyes filled with shy coquetry, ...
— Kilmeny of the Orchard • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... "New girls are notoriously callow," she remarked, "but I should have thought anybody with the slightest grain of sense could have seen at a glance what Raymonde is. Why, she's simply been playing ragtime on you. Did you actually and seriously believe that the girls at this school were ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... with dew. It is remarkable how, in the midst of the most absorbing cares, one's attention may be fixed by some insignificant object, as mine was by the flight past the line of a bluebird, one of the brightest-plumaged of our feathered tribes, bearing a worm in his beak, breakfast for his callow brood. Birdie had been on the war path, and ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... afterward that Daylight came on to New York. A letter from John Dowsett had been the cause—a simple little typewritten letter of several lines. But Daylight had thrilled as he read it. He remembered the thrill that was his, a callow youth of fifteen, when, in Tempas Butte, through lack of a fourth man, Tom Galsworthy, the gambler, had said, "Get in, Kid; take a hand." That thrill was his now. The bald, typewritten sentences seemed gorged ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... pair to look at, as they stood before her, tall, vivid, vital. Beside Basil Kildare the youths who had hitherto courted Kate, young as she was, seemed callow and insignificant, even to the mother. It would need a man to rule such a woman as Kate was to become, not an adoring boy; and Mrs. Leigh was of the type and generation that believed firmly in the mastery ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... a flash of green, straight at the callow boy. But Poins had sprung too, back and to the left, and his oiled sword was from its scabbard and warring in ...
— Privy Seal - His Last Venture • Ford Madox Ford
... through the groves, with quiet tread, On his accustomed haunts he sped, The mother-thrush, unstartled, sung Her descant to her callow young, And fearless o'er his threshold prest The wanderer from the sparrow's nest, The squirrel raised a sparkling eye Nor from his kernel cared to fly As passed that gentle hermit by. No timid creature shrank to meet His pensive glance, serenely sweet; From his own kind, alone, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... in the stern-sheets by her side, I kept on sculling gently. Once before I had gone desperately to sea—escaping the gallows, perhaps—in a very small boat, with the drunken song of Rangsley's uncle heralding the fascination of the unknown to a very callow youth. That night had been as dark, but the danger had been less great. The boat, it is true, had actually sunk under us, but then it was only the sea that might have swallowed me who knew nothing of life, and was as much a ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... Hereinafter is recorded nothing more weighty than the follies of young persons, perpetrated in a lost world which when compared with your ladyship's present planet seems rather callow. Hereinafter are only love-stories, and nowadays nobody takes love-making ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... her rocky hold forsakes, Rous'd, in a fright her sounding wings she shakes; The cavern rings with clattering:—out she flies, And leaves her callow care, and cleaves the skies: At first she flutters:—but at length she springs To smoother flight, and ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... towards metaphysics, and upon the form which subsequent Christian apologetics adopted. As a nickname the term "agnostic'' was soon misused to cover any and every variation of scepticism, and just as popular preachers confused it with atheism (q.v.) in their denunciations, so the callow freethinker—following Tennyson's path of "honest doubt''—classed himself with the agnostics, even while he combined an instinctively Christian theism with a facile rejection of the historical ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... regarded him at least as one who neglected his opportunities, but his great laugh at their callow jests and their advice to him was so frank and indifferent a thing that they found it singularly baffling. 'Twas indeed as if a man of ripe years and wisdom had laughed at them with good-nature, because he knew they ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... ferry boats were crossing to and fro, and the larger excursion boats which had brought throngs of sightseers to New London were making the navigation of the stream a problem for even more experienced hands, much less the callow youth who was putting up a bluff at steering the "wash ...
— Peggy Stewart: Navy Girl at Home • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... The callow pair saw something more of each other during the morning; for Pocket hotly resented being distrusted, and showed it by making up to the young girl under the doctor's nose. He talked to her about books in the other room. He had the ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... can be recovered only by frankly putting away the unreasonable reverence. We must exorcise a superstition to save a faith. We must part with the unreal Bible if we would hold the real Bible. Iconoclasm is not pleasant to any but the callow youth. It may be none the less needful; and then the sober man must not shrink from shivering the ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... fed, Chirping warbler, bear'st away, Thou the busy buzzing bee, To thy callow brood a prey? Warbler, thou a warbler seize? Winged, one with lovely wings? Guest thyself, by Summer brought, Yellow guest whom Summer brings? Wilt not quickly let it drop? 'Tis not fair, indeed ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... I am no callow, ardent youth. I am an elderly man, broken in health and body, and soon to die. I am a scientist and a philosopher. I, as all the generations of philosophers before me, know woman for what she is—her weaknesses, and meannesses, and immodesties, ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London |
