"Decrepitude" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... replied, he had no inclination to do so. "I have heard you often say, and I think truly, that it was of little use to my brother, King Eystein, that he took to flight; and yet he was a man distinguished for many qualities which adorn a king. Now I, who labour under so great decrepitude, can see how bad my fate would be, if I betook myself to what proved so unfortunate for him; with so great a difference as there is between our activity, health, and strength. I was in the second year of my age when I was chosen king of Norway, and ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
... impenetrated with this truth; for in representing those who practice abstinence by choice or duty as misers or anchorites, they always give them the pallor of disease, the leanness of misery, and the wrinkles of decrepitude. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... of exorcism, nor any untried enchantment. The success of violent designs against the National Assembly, had success been possible, could, after all, have been followed by no other consummation than the relapse of France into the raging anarchy of Poland, or the sullen decrepitude of Turkey. ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... ordinary way. Burr lived then 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
... 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 ...
— Under the Southern Cross • Elizabeth Robins
... descanting on the needs of the old land, until I 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
... leaves her corner behind the iron stove, and stands before the window, resting her two hands on the stout bar of her cane, and gazing out across the waste with eyes which age has restored after four decades of decrepitude. ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... 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
... languages, both from internal causes (mechanism and the like), and also from causes external to the language, laid in the varying velocities of social progress and social decline; but so it is, that whether of shorter or longer life, they have their youth, their manhood, their old age, their decrepitude, their final dissolution. Not indeed that, even when this last hour has arrived, they disappear, leaving no traces behind them. On the contrary, out of their death a new life comes forth; they pass into new forms, the materials ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... of the opera-dancer 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 his nose, and turns round until the applause comes, even if that be delayed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... 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 once ...
— What Two Children Did • Charlotte E. Chittenden
... against the domestic police of great houses, and the essential inhumanity of the ordinary household relations, are both excellent and of permanent interest. There is the full breath of a new humaneness in them. They were the right way of attacking the decrepitude of feudal luxury and insolence, and its imitation among the great farmers-general. This criticism of the conditions of domestic service marks a beginning of true democracy, as distinguished from the mere pulverisation of aristocracy. It rests on the claim of the common ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... 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, ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... the taste is dissatisfied with their 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 in the idea of a time-stricken ...
— Buds and Bird Voices (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... has no home here but the grave—no pillow on which to forget its cares but the dust. The sight of these wretched old men, turned out from, the little holdings that sheltered their helplessness, to beg a morsel, through utter charity, in the decrepitude of life, was enough to make a man wish that he had never been born to witness such a wanton abuse of that power which was entrusted to man for the purpose of diffusing happiness instead of misery. All ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... truths 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
... when one has not walked for a long time; but once squarely set, he stood solidly—like a column of masonry. The bent shoulders had straightened up and the chest had filled out; there was no evidence of decrepitude in the ease with which he manipulated his ponderous mace, swinging it from side to side in great, slow circles. Only Constans noticed that he kept his head turned constantly in one direction, where there was a great flare of ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... slew in battle that mighty warrior, Jarasandha, possessing the strength of ten thousand elephants. Related to Vasudeva and having the sons of king Drupada as their brothers-in-law, who that is subject to decrepitude and death would undertake to cope with them in battle? O bull of the Bharata race, let there be peace between thee and Pandavas! Follow thou my counsels and surrender ...
— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... 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 supposed, be guilty of the unnatural crime of murdering her decrepid or deformed offspring—the ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... shared the dining-table, covered 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
... day-laborer. This class is infinitely diversified, but will aptly enough fall into principal divisions. Men, from the decline, which after fifty becomes every year more sensible, to the period of debility and decrepitude, and the maladies that precede a final dissolution. Women, whose employment on husbandry is but occasional, and who differ more in effective labor one from another than men do, on account of gestation, nursing, and domestic management, over and above the difference ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... tyrannical king 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 earthquake followed ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... on her behalf, against the knots of clownish and often brutal sophists, the wrecks of the old Cynic, Stoic, and Academic schools, who, with venom increasing, after the wont of parties, with their decrepitude, assailed the beautifully bespangled card-castle of Neo-Platonism, as an empty medley of all Greek philosophies with all Eastern superstitions. All such Philistines had as yet dreaded the pen and tongue of Raphael, even more than those of the chivalrous Bishop of Cyrene, though he certainly, ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... point of material interest presented by this design is the decrepit and distorted shadow of the demon, respecting which it may be well to remind the reader that all the great Italian thinkers concurred in assuming decrepitude or disease, as well as ugliness, to be a characteristic of all natures of evil. Whatever the extent of the power granted to evil spirits, it was always abominable and contemptible; no element of beauty or heroism was ever allowed to remain, ...
— Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin
... 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 is Encyclopedies, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... admiration of future generations, combining in its tone-power and magnificence the qualities of a Rembrandt, a Titian, a Velasquez." The picture does not challenge you—you have to hunt it out, and you have to bring something to it, else 't will not reveal itself. There is no decrepitude in the woman's face and form, but someway you read into the picture the story of a great and tender love and a long life of useful effort. And now as the evening shadows gather, about to fade off into gloom, the old mother sits there alone, poised, serene: husband gone, children gone—her work is ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... and after some parley, was shown up into Aunt Winnie's room. It was spotless in its cleanliness and bare save for the most necessary articles of furniture. There were three other old ladies about in various stages of decrepitude, who seemed only dully conscious of Dan's appearance; but Aunt Winnie, seated in her armchair by the window, started up in tremulous rapture at sight of her boy. Despite her age and infirmity, she was still a trig little ...
— Killykinick • Mary T. Waggaman
... to the same process. It would be nonsense to regret it, because the very existence of these old edifices is involved in their being renewed; but it certainly does deprive them of a great part of their charm, and puts one in mind of wigs, padding, and all such devices for giving decrepitude the aspect of youth. In the pavement of the nave and aisles there are worn tombstones, with defaced inscriptions, and discolored marbles affixed against the wall; monuments, too, where a mediaeval man and wife sleep side by side on ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Captain Asher's reputation that he had no opportunity to answer Miss Port's remarks. At that instant Mr. Simeon Port appeared at the door which opened from the parlor on the piazza. He stepped quickly, his actions showing nothing of that decrepitude which his dutiful daughter had feared would prevent him from seeking the society of his friends. He fixed his eyes on his daughter and spoke ...
— The Captain's Toll-Gate • Frank R. Stockton
... Schiavoni, which now renders the Sea Facade as important as that to the Piazzetta. There was only a narrow walk between the pillars and the water; and the old palace of Ziani still faced the Piazzetta, and interrupted, by its decrepitude, the magnificence of the square where the ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... while stamping 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 ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • James Stephens
... stepped back in this emergency, with more agility than could have been anticipated in a man of his apparent decrepitude; and, seizing up the pot, prepared to hurl it at his assailant's head. But Charley Bates, at this moment, calling his attention by a perfectly terrific howl, he suddenly altered its destination, and flung it full at ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... 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 Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... and unreasonable rapidity. The 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 shoals ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke
... evenings of spring, and eyes so pretty to look at, and smiles of young girls, and breaths of perfumes which gardens exhale when the nights of April fall, and all this delicious cajoling of life, since it is all to end ironically in separation, in decrepitude and in death— ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... coming to the house was not to put his foot through it; and as to the barn, if it was dropping to pieces it would just have to drop. The barn was definitely outside the radius of possible amelioration—it passed gradually, visibly, into decrepitude, and Mrs Murchison often wished she could afford ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... 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 ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... and lawless license of Chioggia in the days of powder, sword-knot, 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 in ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... 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 men receive even my benefits with shrinking horror and ill-suppressed disgust? ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... mankind as a progression by various stages, from a condition of primitive savagery to civilization, is in Lucretius' great poem De Rerum Natura. But Lucretius does not conceive this progress will continue. On the contrary he recognizes that the world has grown old and already shows signs of decrepitude which foreshadow its ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... 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 ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... affairs only of kings; waiting on them obsequiously and stately, as if she were but a mistress of Court ceremonies, and had nothing to do with the registering of the affairs of the common people. I have seen in his very old age and decrepitude the old French King Lewis the Fourteenth, the type and model of kinghood—who never moved but to measure, who lived and died according to the laws of his Court-marshal, persisting in enacting through life the part of Hero; and, divested of poetry, this was but a little wrinkled old man, pock-marked, ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... child of so much pride and promise, now, alas! how changed. It was most touching to look upon one whose morning of life had been so bright and beautiful and, still in the sunny days of childhood, transformed into an image of decrepitude and decay. The fair blooming cheek and finely chiselled features were now shrunk and stiffened into the wan and rigid inflexibility of old age; while the black bandages which swathed the little ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... declared that whatever his opinion might be as to the doctrines of the Socialists, he for one should throw in his lot with the people, until the Government atoned for their atrocity by showing that they were prepared to listen to the demands of men who knew what they wanted, and whom the decrepitude of society forced into pushing their demands in some ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... N. age; oldness^ &c adj.; old age, advanced age, golden years; senility, senescence; years, anility^, gray hairs, climacteric, grand climacteric, declining years, decrepitude, hoary age, caducity^, 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 ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... 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 ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... means that would not bear the light, made his support necessary to Pitt himself, and placed a fantastic political jobber at the helm of England in a time when she needed a patriot and a statesman. Newcastle was the growth of the decrepitude and decay of a great party, which had fulfilled its mission and done its work. But if the Whig soil had become poor for a wholesome crop, it was never so ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... seen him a week 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 a long-continued ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... by lay the pipe, fashioned of the 'foam of perilous seas in fairy lands forlorn,' the pipe on which, perchance, some swain had discoursed sweet music near the shady heights of High Holborn. The cradle of infancy, the gamp of decrepitude, the tricycle of fleeting youth, the paraffin lamp which had lighted bridal gaiety, the flask which had held the foaming malt,—all were gathered here, and the dust lay ...
— HE • Andrew Lang
... even if not unmeaning, to say that a man's soul more truly survives in his son's youth than in his own decrepitude; but this principle grows more obvious as we descend to simpler beings, in which individual life is less elaborated and has not intrenched itself in so many adventitious and somewhat permanent organs. In vegetables soul and seed go forth together and ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... interests of earth. That such a doctrine has often been joined to an intense worldliness, all history proclaims; but with this we have at present nothing to do. If all mankind acted on it in good faith, the world would sink into decrepitude. It is the monastic idea carried into the wide field of active life, and is like the error of those who, in their zeal to cultivate their higher nature, suffer the neglected body to dwindle and pine, till body and mind alike ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... the procession 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 infinitely worse than the pang ...
— Moriah's Mourning and Other Half-Hour Sketches • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... 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 child—non ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... marked characteristics of middle life, and mutually assimilated them all. They were a group of merry youngsters, almost maddened with the exuberant frolicsomeness of their years. The most singular effect of their gayety was an impulse to mock the infirmity and decrepitude of which they had so lately been the victims. They laughed loudly at their old-fashioned attire—the wide-skirted coats and flapped waistcoats of the young men, and the ancient cap and gown of the blooming girl. One limped across the floor like a gouty ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... receive her freedom, on condition that she take care of and support her faithful James,- faithful, not only to her as a husband, but proverbially faithful as a slave to those who would not willingly sacrifice a dollar for his comfort, now that he had commenced his descent into the dark vale of decrepitude and suffering. This important decision was received as joyful news indeed to our ancient couple, who were the objects of it, and who were trying to prepare their hearts for a severe struggle, and one altogether new to them, as they had never before been separated; for, though ignorant, helpless, ...
— The Narrative of Sojourner Truth • Sojourner Truth
... town meeting was 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- bag. After nightfall, this carpet-bag, accompanied ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... 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 not a few griffons ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... government is to 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 ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... own flight, had the mortification to see all the lands assigned to charitable and to religious uses, the humane and pious foundations of themselves and their ancestors, made to support infirmity and decrepitude, to give feet to the lame and eyes to the blind, and to effect which they had deprived themselves of many of the enjoyments of life, cruelly sequestered and sold at the same market of violence and fraud ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... of all was, that this young girl had not come into the world to be homely. In her early childhood she must even have been pretty. The grace of her age was still struggling against the hideous, premature decrepitude of debauchery and poverty. The remains of beauty were dying away in that face of sixteen, like the pale sunlight which is extinguished under hideous clouds at ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... 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 to that expression. What is there as ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... polemic to the point that history revolves forever through five recurring epochs, and that, as our civilization has been now four centuries in the "age of reason," it must next (and probably soon) pass into the fifth stage, that of decrepitude, and thence into infantile credulity and imbecility once more,—as a demonstration that history is such a Sisyphus, his induction ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... restaurants, a few auction-rooms, a few furniture warehouses, and will hardly realize that you have left behind you the activity and clatter of a city of merchants before you find yourself in a region of architectural decrepitude, where an ancient and foreign-seeming domestic life, in second stories, overhangs the ruins of a former commercial prosperity, and upon every thing has settled down a long sabbath of decay. The vehicles in the street are few in number, and are merely passing through; the stores are shrunken into ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... 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 of commonest clay transformed ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... Chinamen on land or sea with an especial and piquant blight invoked upon the one now in hiding, then took from the back of a chair where she had hung it the moment before a riding skirt come to feebleness and decrepitude. She held it up before critical eyes as one scanning the morning paper ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... 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 ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... something grotesque in their decrepitude. Their toothless mouths, their hooked noses, the meagreness of the active one, and the hanging yellow cheeks of the other (the still one, whose head trembled) would have been laughable if the sight of their dreadful physical degradation had not been appalling to one's eyes, had ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... Old age has a singular aspect in lilacs, rose-bushes, and other ornamental shrubs. It seems as if such things, as they grow only for beauty, ought to flourish in immortal youth, or at least to die before their decrepitude. They are trees of Paradise, and therefore not naturally subject to decay; but have lost their birthright by being transplanted hither. There is a kind of ludicrous unfitness in the idea of a venerable rose-bush; and there is something analogous ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... too-curious observation of those who dwelt 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
... thy bark afloat upon th' Eternal Main! } Fear not; but still indulge thy wanton hours, And strew thy wint'ry path with vernal flowers. How long thine hours may last, I cannot say; FOLLY ne'er sees beyond the present day. And should Old Time, with subtle art, delude Thy feebled Age into decrepitude; Still on thy crutches sing, and dance, and play, And gild the close of Life's short Holiday! No second Childhood can my S—— wear; The first yet boasts an incomplete career. Amid the duties of maturer age, The playful Child was blended with the ...
— The First of April - Or, The Triumphs of Folly: A Poem Dedicated to a Celebrated - Duchess. By the author of The Diaboliad. • William Combe
... both equally constant and active, like all the other instrumentalities and governing agencies of the universe. Life is forever unlocking the portals of the present to youth and vigor; Death is forever closing them to age and decrepitude. This divine prevision thus becomes the wisest and most beneficent provision. Without life there would be no such thing as death, and without death no such thing as this grand succession and march of life—this passing from out ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... come into theirs at no distant date; the old lady was so visibly going to pieces. There were several more besides, as for instance that Rose had already fifteen hundred a year from her father. The figure had been betrayed in Hill Street; it was part of the proof of Mrs. Tramore's decrepitude. Then there was an equal amount that her mother had to dispose of and on which the girl could absolutely count, though of course it might involve much waiting, as the mother, a person of gross insensibility, evidently wouldn't die of cold-shouldering. ...
— The Chaperon • Henry James
... zenith, and when her powers were but here and there evoked; will the same England, afraid of the truth which she has vindicated, or even with the license which has mingled like a weed with its growth, recur to that system in its decrepitude which she repudiated in its vigor?" If the Church of England ever lost her power, it would never be by submission to Rome, "but by that principle of religions insubordination and self-dependence ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... poncho over his shoulders, and sandals on his feet. His projecting, dropping lower jaw exhibited the few decayed teeth he had in his head, which, with his lustreless eyes, made him look the very picture of decrepitude. He brightened up and rose, however, as he saw Uncle Richard,—with whom he was acquainted, and who had frequently shown him kindness,—and welcomed us ...
— In New Granada - Heroes and Patriots • W.H.G. Kingston
... quatrains describe the 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 ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... purely reared child is putting a stone in the foundation of prosperity for this wonderful new civilization, which will go on evolving, or die of decrepitude, just as its central dynamic force, the sex life of the people, finally decides. Sex immorality is, as every one knows, one of the signs of the approaching death of ...
— The Renewal of Life; How and When to Tell the Story to the Young • Margaret Warner Morley
... Chateaubriand and Wagner? They were not killed by derision. And in order not to make you too proud, I must tell you that they are models, each in his own way, and in a very rich world, while you are only the first in the decrepitude of your art." Sinister and disquieting that last phrase, and for those who see in impressionism the decadence of painting (because of the predominance given to the parts over the whole) ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... by Mr. Thomas A. Watson. 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 bark from ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... modified by the different degrees of density in the atmosphere; by the variety of the seasons, and by the various properties of the aliments received into the stomach: in short, he would be obliged to acknowledge that at some periods it manifests visible signs of torpor, stupefaction, decrepitude, and death. ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... proposition must necessarily excite, I can oppose my own observation, leaving antiquity, with its faultless statues and sculptures, to shift for itself. The Hindoo women, of whom I have seen hundreds at once bathing in the Hoogly, of all ages, from childhood to decrepitude, have extremely fine forms, when young, that is from twelve to twenty-two or three, at which period they have all the marks of old age. As they bathe with only a single thin cotton garment, which, when wet, sticks close to their bodies, and developes their forms most completely, any ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... like a crown, gave her the seeming of royalty in full panoply. There was white lace over her black velvet at the shoulders; her train swept yards behind her. She was bearing a cane, or rather a staff, of ebony; but it suggested, not decrepitude, but power—perhaps even a weapon that might be used to enforce authority should occasion demand. In her face, in her eyes, however, there was that which forbade the supposition of any revolt being never ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... 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 smiling lips. It was the grand seignior, he of the ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... 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 ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... referred all the pleasures of the intellect to the memory of past and the hope of future sensual gratification. Yet there is preserved an extract of a letter from Epicurus, in which he says that his own bodily pains in his years of decrepitude are outweighed by the pleasure derived from the memory of ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... served by dwelling further on the absurd and often disgusting prescriptions of such works as the Tathagata-guhyaka. If the European reader is inclined to condemn unreservedly a religion which even in decrepitude could find place for such monstrosities, he should remember that the aberrations of Indian religion are due not to its inherent depravity, but to its universality. In Europe those who follow disreputable occupations rarely suppose that they have anything to do with ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... the 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 ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... sorrow, when well used—by sentiment, I say, great nations live. When sentiment dies out, and mere prosaic calculation of loss and profit takes its place, then comes a Byzantine epoch, a Chinese epoch, decrepitude, and slow decay. ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... wise measures the savages would probably have continued the war many years had not Opechancanough fallen into the hands of the English. The old king was surprised by Sir William Berkeley, and, because of his decrepitude, was easily captured.[337] He was taken in triumph to Jamestown, where the Governor intended to keep him until he could be sent to England and brought before Charles I. But a few days after the capture, a common soldier, in revenge for the harm done the colony by Opechancanough, ...
— Virginia under the Stuarts 1607-1688 • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... again; when he did so his eyes changed, looking helpless and malicious without the glasses, like those of little owlets in daylight; his thin, shaven lips were closely compressed, and there was often an expression of mistrust and decrepitude in his face; his conversation and ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... fall, but the silence and mystery of its government concealed even from the Venetians the decrepitude of the state. The government was an aristocratic sovereignty, founded on the corruption of the people and treachery, for the master sinew of the government was espionage; its prestige, mystery; its power, the torture. It lived on terror and voluptuousness; its police was a system of ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... will try to procure me this favor. My only trust is in your support; and I am persuaded that, having the honor to be so closely connected with you, you would reproach yourself, if you saw me sink into decrepitude, without resources and without honors." [Footnote: Frontenac au Ministre, 15 Sept., 1692.] And still again he appeals to the minister for "some permanent and honorable place attended with the marks of distinction, ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... tree of 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 thing ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... master are conspicuous—he has got rid of the cark and care, the anxiety and incessant worry of managing slaves; all the trouble and responsibility of rearing them from infancy, of their proper maintenance in health, and sickness, and decrepitude, of coercing them to labor, restraining, correcting, and punishing their faults and crimes—settling all their grievances and disputes. He is now entirely free from all apprehension of injury, revenge, or insurrection, however transient and momentary such impression may have formerly ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... 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 Martial paint ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... 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 appear and ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... resolved to decline all overtures, by taking refuge in his decrepitude; but the attorney's steady prolonged ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... iii., p. 203.).—The allusions in Hall's poem, stanzas iii. & v., refer to the fine allegorical description of human decrepitude in Ecclesiastes, xii. 5, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 74, March 29, 1851 • Various
... the Peninsula have been reduced to such a state of decrepitude, that I believe there was no authority existing within Spain or Portugal before the French invaded these countries. The French invasion did not improve this state of things; and, since what is called in Spain the revolution, and in Portugal ...
— Maxims And Opinions Of Field-Marshal His Grace The Duke Of Wellington, Selected From His Writings And Speeches During A Public Life Of More Than Half A Century • Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington
... constructing obelisks followed the usual stages in the history of all human art. Its best period was that which indicated the greatest faith; its worst that which marked the decay of faith. The oldest specimens are invariably the most perfect and beautiful; the most recent exhibit too marked signs of the decrepitude of skill that had come over their makers. Between the oldest specimens and their surroundings there was a harmony and an appropriateness which solemnised the scene and excited feelings of adoration and awe. Between the latest specimens and their surroundings ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... her purse out with a trembling hand, and eagerly fumbled for some money, which the other old woman greedily watched for—their heads all but touching, in their hurry and decrepitude—Edith interposed: ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... old degenerate marrying the daughter of his mistress because her eighteen years attracts his vicious decrepitude. My absolute indifference to that, may I say, can not easily be formulated. She shall be spared as much as possible. The thing can be kept secret for years. She can live in entire seclusion. No one need be told until I am dead—or ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... day by a fire, even in that July weather; his longest walk was to the little grey church which stood naked upon a mound some quarter of a mile away and within view of the windows, and even that walk taxed his strength. He was an old man fallen upon decrepitude, and almost out of recognition, so that his gestures and the rare tones of his voice struck upon Durrance as something painful, like the mimicry of a dead man. His collie dog seemed to age in company, and, to see them side by side, one might ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... 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 ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser
... And, O king, they were 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 to gratify my appetites in the company of young women. Do you help ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... 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 may be in ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... triple brass; upon humanity such a period works nothing 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 ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... moat-house was in perfect harmony, attuned by its own decrepitude to the general dissolution of its surroundings. Its aspect was a shuttered front of sightlessness, a brick and stone blindness to the changes of the seasons and the futility of existence. The terraced gardens had put on ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... 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 materially contributed to the general ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... Churches, therefore, were destined to labour not for themselves, but for us. The signs of disease and decrepitude were already but too manifest in them. That very peculiar turn of the Graeco-Eastern mind, which made them the great thinkers of the then world, had the effect of drawing them away from practice to speculation; and the races of Egypt and ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... which never meant much to their minds, and now mean nothing; both perfectly reverential and proper in behaviour, with no more possibility of individual fervour of belief than of individual levity of disbelief: the Church, as it exists in well-regulated decrepitude. And thus does the last of the Giottesques, the painter of glorified Madonnas and dancing angels, the saint, represent the saints admitted to behold the ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... vivacious, had remained engraven on her mind; his face had grown hollow, his hair was streaked with silver threads. But notwithstanding, she found in him still, with his delicately handsome head, a languid grace, like that of a girl, even in his premature decrepitude. ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... 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 ...
— The Elixir of Life • Honore de Balzac
... you fellows would regard as the last stages of decrepitude. A little beer and tobacco knocks me over. If I drank coffee and ate pie the way you do, I'd have to take morphine to get a night's sleep. You fellows need never envy us intellectuals. You can drink and smoke and eat anything, and all the poisons you ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... archbishop 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 sky, ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... weighing of words by the Precieuses and the grammarians, and by the French Academy, child of the intercourse between those ladies and gentlemen. He brought ridicule on the inane politeness of a style then in its decrepitude, and bade the writers of his time find models in the Latin writers who, like Virgil and Horace, had brought natural thought and speech to their perfection. In the preceding labour for the rectifying of the language, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... have wretched constitutions. If I go to work regularly for a couple of months without a holiday, I sink into absolute decrepitude. An office-chair has been specially made for me, to hold me up at the desk.—I beg your pardon for this clowning, Mrs. Widdowson,' he suddenly added in another voice. 'The air puts me in such spirits. What air it is! Speaking quite seriously, my mother was saved by coming to ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... wings are quite comprehensible creatures; for one fancies them so light and airy and transparent, living upon honey dew and ambrosia, that wings wherewith to fly seem their natural appendages. But the decrepitude of old age and the wings of youth and power are a strange mixture:—a bald head, and a Fairy's swiftness!—how ridiculous it seems, and so I think I may well say Time is a very odd sort ...
— The Fairy Godmothers and Other Tales • Mrs. Alfred Gatty
... nursed him, offering him her breast. The gods had body and soul, like men; they had bones, muscles, flesh and blood; they hungered and thirsted, ate and drank; they had our passions, griefs, joys and infirmities; and they were subject to age, decrepitude and death, though they lived very far beyond the term ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... seemed to have become crystallized, as it were, in age and decrepitude, and advanced no further in either—was pottering around the garden, eying askant, like an old robin, the new plough furrows. Pauper women humped their calico backs over the green slopes of the fields, searching ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... 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.)
... 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 a ...
— George Bowring - A Tale Of Cader Idris - From "Slain By The Doones" By R. D. Blackmore • R. D. Blackmore
... then puffed itself out again; then starved one side to enlarge another; then warped itself quite out of its first line. Opaque, rough-surfaced, jagged on the edge, distorted in the spine, it exhibits a quite human image of decrepitude and dishonour; but the worst of all the signs of its decay and helplessness, is that half-way up, a parasite crystal, smaller, but just as sickly, has rooted itself in the side of the larger one, eating out ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... and very likely it was annoying to watch the old man still doddering round his tree with drawn sword. One would like to ask whether the crazy tyrant was aware how well he was fulfilling the ancient rite by ordaining the slaughter of decrepitude. And one would like to ask also whether the stalwart ruffian himself took up the line of consecrated and ghastly succession. Someone, at all events, took it up; for in the bland age of the Antonines the priest was still there, pacing with drawn sword, turning his ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... 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 it could burst into ...
— Maitre Cornelius • Honore de Balzac
... advance. But you are deceiving quarrellers. It is all a word—mere smoke, that blinds you. The Christian seems to affirm three Gods, and even to aggravate this wickedness by calling one of them 'a Son,' thus seeming to accept that monstrous notion that God is liable to old age and decrepitude, so as to provide wisely against His own dotage. But all this is an error: these three apparent Gods are but one, and in the ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... thousand miles of travel through California I saw just one Indian—a bronze youth of perhaps twenty summers and, I should say, possibly half that many baths. He was wearing the scenario of a pair of overalls and a straw hat in an advanced state of decrepitude, and he was working in a truckpatch; if a native had not told me what he was I would have passed him by for ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... 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 a high estimate on the element of labor in their economy, ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... our right stands 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 ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... and of having set his people an example in preserving the monuments of a 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 land, ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... amazement on the self immolation by fire to which it inspired the Gymnosophists; Casar found its tenets propagated among the Gauls beyond the Rubicon; and at this hour it reigns despotic, as the learned and travelled Professor of Sanscrit at Oxford tells us, "without any sign of decrepitude or decay, over the Burman, Chinese, Tartar, Tibetan, and Indian nations, including at least six hundred and fifty millions of mankind."1 There is abundant evidence to prove that this scheme of thought prevailed at a very early period among the Egyptians, all classes and sects ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... near and dear to us as life's blood, had by money and comforts, (which but for this incident would have been kept secret), for many months relieved an inmate of a London hospital. The patient was a poor, old female, in the last stage of decrepitude, and fast sinking beneath the sorrows of life. She had seen happier days, and the only relic which she possessed of better fortune, was a pair of silver framed spectacles; which, on her death-bed, she ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 383, August 1, 1829 • Various
... overgrown garden surrounded by an ancient stockade ten feet in height, with a massive, slow-swinging gate in front, defended by loopholes. This stockade bulged out in some places and leaned in at others; but the veteran posts, each a tree sharpened to a point, did not break their ranks, in spite of decrepitude; and the Indian warriors, could they have returned from their happy hunting-grounds, would have found the brave old fence of the Agency a sturdy barrier still. But the Indian warriors could not return. The United States agent had long ago moved to Lake Superior, ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... Sir, the Sphinx's description of it;—morning, noon, and night. I would know night, as well as morning and noon.' JOHNSON. 'What, Sir, would you know what it is to feel the evils of old age? Would you have the gout? Would you have decrepitude?'—Seeing him heated, I would not argue any farther; but I was confident that I was in the right. I would, in due time, be a Nestor, an elder of the people; and there should be some difference between the conversation of twenty-eight and sixty-eight. A grave picture should not be gay. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... 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 not improbable of fulfilment, for they were not ...
— A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories • William D. Howells
... relief persisted. He told himself that a very tragical thing had befallen him; that this broken engagement was the ruin of his life and the end of his youth, and that he must live on an old and joyless man, wise with the knowledge that comes to decrepitude and despair; he imagined a certain look for himself, a gait, a name, that would express this; but all the same he was aware of having got out of something. Was it a bondage, a scrape, as Boardman called it? He thought he must be a very light, shallow, and frivolous ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... hoary decrepitude, Shaking wintery brows benign, (155) Nods a tremulous Yes to all. Hymen, O Hymenaeus, O Hymen, O ...
— The Poems and Fragments of Catullus • Catullus
... mirror which hung on the rough gray plaster wall opposite, just over the small, cheap, brown-stained wooden bureau. The sight of his countenance, as is the case with most of us who have not yet entered the limbo of senile decrepitude and still dare look ourselves in the face, was always a source of extreme satisfaction to him. He held it in the highest esteem as though it were the head of some beautiful antique Apollo, and in his, the Colonel's estimation, was the ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... what would you say about the body, my friend? Are you not surprised at any one of his own accord bringing upon himself deformity, leanness, ugliness, decrepitude? ...
— Laws • Plato
... 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. ...
— The Princess and the Curdie • George MacDonald
... was sixty, but her figure was like a girl's. She led a blind pug in a complicated leading apparatus, and several other pugs in various stages of fat and decrepitude followed her. It was not long before she raised a discussion on hydrophobia, defending the disease from all the charges of horror and contagion that had been urged against it, narrating vehemently ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... hopeful oak in the prime of life, and the oak that totters in desolate and crabbed old age. The oak that enjoys in middle age the good things of life, with well-fed and rounded symmetry; and the oak that suggests decrepitude, with rough exterior, and a life-experience of hardship; the sturdy oak, the ambitious oak, the self-contained oak, and so on, through every phase of character. No other tree is so human or so expressive, and no other ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... characteristics of that school are crystallized. From the point of view which would enter sympathetically into the soul of Ibsen and look out on the world from his eyes, there is no one of his plays more valuable in its purely theoretic way than Rosmersholm. It dissects the decrepitude of ancient formulas, it surveys the ruin of ancient faiths. The curse of heredity lies upon Rosmer, who is highly intelligent up to a certain point, but who can go no further. Even if he is persuaded that a new course of action would ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... and fall away, in just that same proportion do they grow and gather there upon the further shore; and secondly that, after Nature's eternal fashion, the youth and vigour of a new generation is waiting to replace the worn-out decrepitude of that which sinks into oblivion. My life is done, it cannot be long before the churchyard claims its own, but I live again in my son; and take such cold comfort as I may from that idea of family, and of long-continued and assured succession, that has so largely helped ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... abysmal darkness and its repeated rebirth in the life of the endless beginning, then it would gradually soil and bury truth with its dust and spread ceaseless aching over the earth under its heavy tread. Then every moment would leave its load of weariness behind, and decrepitude would reign supreme on its ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... types out of this exhaustless portraiture, I may name Dandie Dinmont, and Michael,) are hitherto a scarcely injured race; whose strength and virtue yet survive to represent the body and soul of England, before her days of mechanical decrepitude, and commercial dishonour. There are men working in my own fields who might have fought with Henry the Fifth at Agincourt, without being discerned from among his knights; I can take my tradesmen's word for a thousand ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... face, partly inclosed in grey whiskers. Four dollars would have been a sufficient price to pay for the garments he stood in, including the wrecked hat he held in his hands and the broken, misshaped shoes on his feet. A purchaser who gave more than four dollars for the whole in its present state of decrepitude would have been but a ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... to detect faults in a circuit, but it seemed to me there was no need to look for faults on the Corydon; it was the virtues, the sound places, that needed looking for. And yet, strange to say, out of her decrepitude loyalty was born. I found it growing on me day by day, a jealous regard for her, the pity that becomes a sort ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... eater will turn away with contemptuous slight. In the whole of this department indeed much still remains to be done; and the stories we read of the old gormandizer, Heliogabalus, and others who lived during the decrepitude of the Roman empire, stories at which many men stare with stupid astonishment, ought ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... before, had arrived at the trying age of three-score and ten, which, for the majority of men, is the age of decrepitude, that sinister forerunner of death; but time had neither bowed his head nor enfeebled his intellect. The clearness of his mind and the vigor of his limbs indicated that he was likely to be one of those ...
— Which? - or, Between Two Women • Ernest Daudet
... difference between Campania and Spitzbergen is trifling, when compared with the difference between a country inhabited by men full of bodily and mental vigour, and a country inhabited by men sunk in bodily and mental decrepitude. Therefore it is that we are not poorer but richer, because we have, through many ages, rested from our labour one day in seven. That day is not lost. While industry is suspended, while the plough lies in the furrow, while the Exchange ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... most of her limited opportunities for practice; inasmuch as at that rate, playing but two parts a year—and such parts: she despised them!—she shouldn't have mastered the rudiments of her trade before decrepitude would compel her to lay it by. The first time she came to the studio after her visit with Dashwood she sprang up abruptly at the end of half an hour, saying she could sit no more—she had had enough and to spare of it. She ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... this Paper, while it would puzzle any other Man to write such a one. I think I must write to T. C. to felicitate him on this truly 'Green Old Age.' Oh, it was good too to read it here, with the old Sea (which also has not sunk into Decrepitude) rolling in from that North: and as I looked up from the Book, there was a Norwegian Barque beating Southward, close to the Shore, and nearly all Sail set. Read—Read! you will, you must, be pleased; and ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... happiness and misery of every condition; observe the power of all the passions in all their combinations, and know the changes of the human mind as they are modified by various institutions, and accidental influences of climate or custom, from the sprightliness of infancy to the despondency of decrepitude. He must divest himself of the prejudices of his age or country; he must consider right and wrong in their abstracted and invariable state; he must disregard present laws and opinions, and rise to general and transcendental truths, ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... since been able to rejoin, reporting monthly that his health unfitted him for the performance of duty. The signature of his last report (not written by himself), of November 30 (herewith[5]), would seem to indicate great physical derangement or decrepitude, ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Polk - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 4: James Knox Polk • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... same ascendancy as Sieyes in the committees. He was a man who only waited the occasion to become great. At Rome, in the best days of the republic, he would have been a Gracchus; in its decline, a Catiline; under the Fronde, a cardinal de Retz; and in the decrepitude of a monarchy, when such a being could only find scope for his immense faculties in agitation, he became remarkable for the vehemence of his passions, and for their punishment, a life passed in committing ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... fall into ruin, like the old cemetery at the Point of Graves. When a headstone here topples over it is kindly lifted up and set on its pins again, and encouraged to do its duty. If it utterly refuses, and is not shamming decrepitude, it has its face sponged, and is allowed to rest and sun itself against the wall of the church with a row of other exempts. The trees are kept pruned, the grass trimmed, and here and there is a rosebush drooping with a ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... in the great waters of the sixteenth century that the nations whose eyes were open, discovered the fountain of perpetual youth, while others, who were blind, passed rapidly onward to decrepitude. England was, in many respects, a despotism so far as regarded governmental forms; and no doubt the Catholics were treated with greater rigour than could be justified even by the perpetual and most dangerous machinations of the seminary priests and their instigators against ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... stay as long as he chose,—the house of the Archbishop of Rouen—a veritable abode of luxury as compared with the Hotel Poitiers, which was a dingy little tumble-down building, very old, and wearing a conscious air of feebleness and decrepitude which was almost apologetic. Its small windows, set well back in deeply hollowed carved arches had a lack-lustre gleam, as of very aged eyes under shelving brows,—its narrow door, without either bolts or bars, hung half-aslant upon creaking rusty ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... the General was wont to survey himself long and fearsomely in the first mirror or show window that presented itself. He began to wonder if he was in failing health. At times he thought he discerned signs of approaching decrepitude, but his doctor assured him that he was never healthier or happier than he appeared to be at this particular period ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... 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 outwit me. ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... comprehend that antiquity and past glory, instead of offering the precious fruit of experience, has brought upon them a palsied decrepitude? ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... against me; and that the prosperity of my 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 ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... advantages between defeat and triumph may admit of question. For them, all truly valuable things are dependent on our complete success; for thence would come the regeneration of a people,—the removal of a foul scurf that has overgrown their life, and keeps them in a state of disease and decrepitude, one of the chief symptoms of which is, that, the more they suffer and are debased, the more they imagine themselves strong and beautiful. No human effort, on a grand scale, has ever yet resulted according to the purpose ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... had thrown himself into a graceful attitude, with his haughty and intelligent head thrown back; he smiled so as to reveal teeth still brilliant and dazzling. The antiquated coquette understood the trick that had been played her. She was standing immediately before a large mirror, in which her decrepitude, so carefully concealed, was only made more manifest. And, thereupon, without even saluting Aramis, who bowed with the ease and grace of the musketeer of early days, she hurried away with trembling steps, which her very precipitation ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... ago, In the morning of the world, When earth was nigher heaven than now: And the King's locks curled, Disparting o'er a forehead full As the milk-white space 'twixt horn and horn Of some sacrificial bull— Only calm as a babe new-born: For he was got to a sleepy mood, So safe from all decrepitude, Age with its bane, so sure gone by, (The gods so loved him while he dreamed) That, having lived thus long, there seemed No need ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... quenched forever now. The slowly gathering ferruginous deposits have been exhausted, and three years have elapsed since the furnace-fires were lighted. The blackened shell of the building stands in cold decrepitude, a melancholy vestige of usefulness outlived. In consequence of the stoppage of the works, Hanover has lost seven-eighths of its population, and only about fifty inhabitants remain in the white cottages grouped about the Big House, who are employed in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... bud thou art, and we will enshrine its shade, though it hath no soul to join it hereafter, and I will resort to vulgar frankness, employed by the truculent commonplace, and say we live in an age of swaggering, badgering, immoral-begotten, vice-ridden, irreligious decrepitude—" Katherine made a hissing noise with her teeth, as if she had been suddenly and severely pricked by a pin, then put up her hands and stopped her ears—this day, Mistress Penwick thou shalt know the character of thy King—Nay, thou shalt know. I will tell ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... 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 |
