"Golden age" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ready to kill him. He understood, we are told, the language of animals, and was afterwards transformed into a bull. Greek tradition as recorded by Plato, Xenophon, Babrius, and others, speaks of an early golden age in which men and animals held colloquies together "as in our fables;" whence we should conclude this much—that there was a time when poets very commonly introduced them as holding conversations, and when philosophers ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... has been so long said as to be commonly believed, that the true characters of men may be found in their letters, and that he who writes to his friend lays his heart open before him. But the truth is that such were the simple friendships of the Golden Age, and are now the friendships only of children. Very few can boast of hearts which they dare lay open to themselves, and of which, by whatever accident exposed, they do not shun a distinct and continued view; and, certainly, who we hide from ourselves we do not show to ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... part of this golden age there came to Athens a middle-aged man from Clazomenae, who, from our present stand-point, was a more interesting personality than perhaps any other in the great galaxy of remarkable men assembled there. The name of this new-comer was Anaxagoras. It was said in after-time, we know ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... according to Aulus Gellius[7], having been accessible to all who cared to use it. It must be admitted that these stories are of doubtful authenticity; and further, that we have no details of the way in which books were cared for in Greece during the golden age of her literature. This dearth of information is the more tantalizing as it is obvious that private libraries must have existed in a city so cultivated as Athens; and we do, in fact, find a few notices which tell us that such was the ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... and intellectual as well as of the material boons which they had already received. The fierce political agitation of later years denies the benefits of British rule and even the superiority of the civilization for which it stands. It has invented the legend of a golden age, when all the virtues flourished and India was a land flowing with milk and honey until British lust of conquest brought it to ruin. No doubt even to-day there are many eminent Hindus who would still rely upon the older methods, and who have sufficiently assimilated the education ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... are thus compacted together. It is in the variety and delicacy of these combinations and all that they imply, far more than in the elements of which they are composed, that man rises farthest above the higher animals; and of these powers later adolescence is the golden age. The aimless and archaic movements of infancy, whether massive and complex or in the form of isolated automatic tweaks or twinges, are thus, by slow processes of combined analysis and synthesis, involving changes as radical as any in all the ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... was enough, for it told me that this radiant daughter of a golden age had bestowed upon me not alone her pity, but her love. And now I first knew what was perhaps the strangest feature of my strange experience: Edith was the great grand-daughter of no other than my lost ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... felt most strongly. Indeed the expulsion of the foreign tyrants, and the restoration of that golden age which had preceded the irruption of Charles the Eighth, were projects which, at that time, fascinated all the master-spirits of Italy. The magnificent vision delighted the great but ill-regulated mind of Julius. It divided with manuscripts and sauces, painters, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... to supply school and college classes with selections from one of the best and most popular Castilian writers of the present day—this present day which shows that in all its manifestations Spanish literature is rapidly approaching a second golden age. And the lasting glory of Spanish literature seems to ...
— Ms vale maa que fuerza • Manuel Tamayo y Baus
... age of Portuguese history, and the "heroes"—notably the Viceroys of Portuguese India—were, in fact, a race of fine soldiers and administrators. No nation, moreover, possesses more conspicuous and splendid memorials of its golden age. It was literally "golden," for Emmanuel the Fortunate, who reaped the harvest sown by Henry the Navigator, was the wealthiest monarch in Europe, and gave his name to the "Emmanueline" style of architecture, a florid Gothic which achieves ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... Schiller, the second in rank of great German poets, was invited to reside at Weimar. Goethe became most warmly attached to him, and the two pursued their high literary callings together. The literary circle now consisted of Goethe, Schiller, Wieland, Herder, and the Grand Duke. It was the golden age of German literature. ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... was about the Mutiny and how and why it failed, when he was not showing us how the Englishes have ruined and robbed India, and comparing the Golden Age of India (when no cow ever died and there was never famine, plague, police nor taxes) with the miserable condition ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... as excited about his clothes as any girl; he spent five times as much on dress as his wife—that appears to have been the Golden Age of husbands. Isn't this a touching entry? You see he really was honest. 'Today came home my fine Camlett cloak with gold buttons, which cost me much money, and I pray God to make me able ...
— Daddy-Long-Legs • Jean Webster
... of the Bible, after a brief prologue, the curtain rises, and we, as spectators, look in upon a process of interlocution. The scene is the green, sunny garden of Eden, that to which the memory of humanity reverts as to its dim golden age, and which ever expresses the bright dream of our youth, ere the rigor of misfortune or the dulness of experience has spoilt it. The dramatis personae are three individuals, Adam, Eve, and the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... on the poetry of the arm-chair and the cradle; but when they lay down their newspapers, or leave their beds a cold night to attend to the wants of either, I shall begin to look for the golden age of chivalry once more. If a short dress is to make the men less gallant than they now are, I beg the women at our next convention to add at least two yards more to every skirt they wear. And you mock us with dependence, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... adopt Mr. Vaux's words) is the golden age of Greek art. During this period arose a spirit of sculpture which combined grace and majesty in the happiest manner, and by emancipating the plastic art from the fetters of antique stiffness, attained, under the direction of Pericles, and by the hand ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... eye-witness,[4349] "as if we were about to be governed by men of the golden age. This free, just and wise people, always in harmony with itself, always clear-sighted in choosing its ministers, moderate in the use of its strength and power, never could be led away, never deceived, never ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... children—Pamela and Margaret, aged eight and five, and little Benjamin, three years old. The time was spring, the period of the Old South, and, while these youngsters did not realize that they were passing through a sort of Golden Age, they must have enjoyed the weeks of leisurely journeying toward what was then ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Tritons rave; They bore him heroes in the secret cave. No care destroy'd, no sick disorder prey'd, No bending age his sprightly form decay'd, No wars were known, no females heard to rage, And poets tell us, 'twas a golden age. 190 ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... the representative figure in the golden age of Athenian greatness, the most perfect example of that equable and harmonious development in every faculty of body and mind which was the aim of Greek civic life at its best. As an orator, he was probably never equalled, and the effect ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... century after the Arab conquest of North Africa, successive Moorish dynasties began to rule in Morocco. In the 16th century, the Sa'adi monarchy, particularly under Ahmad AL-MANSUR (1578-1603), repelled foreign invaders and inaugurated a golden age. In 1860, Spain occupied northern Morocco and ushered in a half century of trade rivalry among European powers that saw Morocco's sovereignty steadily eroded; in 1912, the French imposed a protectorate over the country. A protracted independence ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... one grain of hellebore,—not a single armourer had a heart to forge one instrument of death;—Friendship and Virtue met together, and kiss'd each other in the street; the golden age returned, and hung over the town of Abdera—every Abderite took his eaten pipe, and every Abderitish woman left her purple web, and chastely sat her down and listened to ...
— A Sentimental Journey • Laurence Sterne
... side," wrote Richter, in his review of "L'Allemagne" in the Heidelberg Jahrbuecher for 1815, "we could not wish the Briton to cast his first glance at us; for the Briton—to whom nothing is so poetical as the common weal—requires (being used to the weight of gold), even for a golden age of poetry, the thick golden wing-cases of his epithet-poets; not the transparent gossamer wings of the Romanticists; no many-coloured butterfly dust; but, at lowest, flower-dust that ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... supposed to be addressed through me to the mothers of America, urging them to bring up the rising generation fatless. Thus only might war cease, justice prevail, love reign, humanity rise, and a golden age come back again to a world-wide Arcadia. Fat and Anti-Fat! Eros and Anteros, Strophe and Antistrophe. Or, better, the old primeval tale,—Jove and the Titans, Theseus and the Centaurs, Bellerophon and the Chimaera, Thor and the Giants, Ormuzd ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... own, and is entirely different from that of Homer. There is a tender grace in the Roman writer which the Greek does not possess. Vergil also lacks that purely pagan enjoyment of life; in its place there is a tender melancholy that suggests the passing of the golden age. This difference of treatment, this added grace and charm, which are always mentioned as peculiarly Vergil's own, united with his poetical feeling, and skill in versification, are sufficient to absolve him from the ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... dream Wing Biddlebaum made a picture for George Willard. In the picture men lived again in a kind of pastoral golden age. Across a green open country came clean-limbed young men, some afoot, some mounted upon horses. In crowds the young men came to gather about the feet of an old man who sat beneath a tree in a tiny garden ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... thee, Christ of Christendom! O'er all the earth thy kingdom come! From distant Trebizond to Rome Thy name shall men adore! Peace and good-will among all men, The Virgin has returned again, Returned the old Saturnian reign And Golden Age once more. ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... the Redeemer performed and incited in the days of his reign. They tell also many things that seem improbable, and therefore are not included in this book: for the old songs and tales incline to make of Count Manuel's heydey a rare golden age. ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... resolved to take a partner in the sovereign power, and showed his wisdom by making choice of Trajan." By this choice, indeed, Nerva commenced and inaugurated the finest period of the Roman empire, the period that contemporaries entitled the golden age, and that history has named the age of the Antonines. It is desirable to become acquainted with the real character of this period, for to it belong the two greatest historical events—the dissolution of ancient pagan, and the ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... Rognvalld: this have the Nornae decreed. In my fiording the pillar of the people has fallen. Build up the cairn, ye active youths, for victory is with us. From the stones of the sea-shore will I pay the Long-legged a hard seat.' There is certainly no trace to be detected, in this dark story, of a golden age of the world: the golden age is, I would fain hope, an age yet to come. There at least exists no evidence that it is an age gone by. It will be the full-grown manly age of the world when the race, as such, shall have attained to their years of discretion. They are at present in their ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... the following section, from which one may safely infer, that the government of the Sandwich islands is by no means one which requires for its exhibition, the innocence, the liberty, and equality of the golden age. Some conclusion may hence be drawn as to the probable origin and antiquity of these islanders. But it is obvious that we are far from possessing sufficient data to enable us to enter satisfactorily on the discussion ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... fictions of the Golden Age, and the philosophic fictions of a State of Nature, equally adopt the same fundamental assumption; in the one, justice was unnecessary, in the other, it was inadmissible. So, if there were a race of creatures so completely servile as never to contest any privilege with ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... Frenchmen—despite the almost infinite and sometimes very startling variety of selection which the laudator temporis acti exhibits—look back upon the reign of Louis Philippe as a golden age in any respect but one. Regarding it from the point of view of general politics, the ridiculous change[330] from "King of France" to "King of the French" stamped it at once, finally and hopelessly, as the worst kind of compromise—as a sort ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... been certain myths universal among men. Gardens of Eden have been absolutely universal—the golden age, which is absolutely the same thing. And what was the golden age born of? Any old man in Boston will tell you that fifty years ago all people were honest. Fifty years ago all people were sociable—there was no stuck-up aristocracy then. Neighbors were neighbors. Merchants ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... in which King James I reigned and died, has been called the "Golden Age of Scottish Poetry," because of the number of poets who lived and wrote then. And so, although I am only going to speak of one other Scottish poet at present, you must remember that there were at this time many more. But of them all William ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... should agree together, seeing they had married sisters; which he afterwards explained to be the sister arts. And when the piece of gold was produced he burst into a loud laugh, and said it must be the golden age, when poets had gold in their pockets, and in that age there could be no robbers. He made many more jests of the same kind, but a ...
— From This World to the Next • Henry Fielding
... better man for that ethereal potation," observed the sculptor. "The finest Orvieto, or that famous wine, the Est Est Est of Montefiascone, is vulgar in comparison. This is surely the wine of the Golden Age, such as Bacchus himself first taught mankind to press from the choicest of his grapes. My dear Count, why is it not illustrious? The pale, liquid gold, in every such flask as that, might be solidified into golden scudi, and would ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... buys literary value, especially from the beginners in literature, there seemed every reason for the poet to hope that there would be as good poetry in the one sort as in the other. In his generous animation, he hoped to find some good poetry on the wood-pulp paper just as in the Golden Age he might have found it carved by amorous shepherds on the bark ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... "Zephir" and the "Baleine" caught but four casks, two each, but they were enormous. Friday the fishing was superb, undreamed of; there were seven casks, three for Rouget and four for La Queue. Coqueville was entering upon a golden age. They never did anything any more. The fishermen, working off the alcohol of the night before, slept till noon. Then they strolled down to the beach and interrogated the sea. Their sole anxiety was to know what liquor the sea was ...
— The Fete At Coqueville - 1907 • Emile Zola
... trifling emendation, and Matthew Arnold's lines will serve to indicate that romance.' Substituting 'Zambesians' for 'Iberians,' he gave us the last lines of 'The Scholar Gipsy.' 'In that era of Tyre's trade,' he concluded, 'I place the golden age of our country a golden age which under our ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... result of this contrast there arises an idea which comes perhaps as near being universal in pastoral as any—the idea, namely, of the 'golden age.' This embraces, indeed, a field not wholly coincident with that of pastoral, but the two are connected alike by a common spring in human emotion and constant literary association. The fiction of an age of simplicity and innocence found birth among the Augustan writers in the ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... became more natural than Laura had seen him for a long time, and he stayed in the drawingroom after dinner, chatting with Lawrence and listening to his wife at the piano, till Laura thought the Golden Age had come again. How long would it last? Philosophers like Laura never ask that question. At all events it lasted till half past nine, when the sick man was honestly tired and the lines of no fictitious pain were drawn deep about his mouth ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... time who turn to the thirteenth century as to the golden age of authoritative faith make a strange mistake. If it is especially the century of saints, it is also that of heretics. We shall soon see that the two words are not so contradictory as might appear; it is enough for the moment to point out that the Church had never been more powerful ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... while her pleasant voice yet sounded in my ears, I sighed; for none but myself, I thought, should have been her companion in a life which seemed to realize my own wild fancies, cherished all through visionary boyhood to that hour. To these two strangers the world was in its golden age, not that indeed it was less dark and sad than ever, but because its weariness and sorrow had no community with their ethereal nature. Wherever they might appear in their pilgrimage of bliss, Youth would echo back their gladness, care- stricken Maturity would rest a moment from its ...
— The Seven Vagabonds (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... for more than 300 years, a period which may be called the golden age of Iceland. Education, literature, and even refined poetry flourished among the inhabitants, who took part in commerce and in the sea-voyages which the Norwegians undertook for ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer
... may be divided into three great periods. In the earliest period, nature is the element that predominates everywhere. The woods, waters and meadows afford food almost spontaneously to a scanty population. This is the Saturnian or golden age of which the sagas tell. Wealth, properly speaking, does not exist here, and those who do not possess a piece of land run the risk of becoming completely dependent on, or even the slave of a land owner. In the second period, ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... removal of Henry Williams, came to an end the Golden Age, or influential period, of the Bay of Islands. Governor and bishop had both left it, and the war had dealt its missions a blow from which they were never to recover. The visitor to Paihia to-day ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... astounded by the intellectual meagreness of these last pagans. The narrowness of their mind and platitude of thought is a thing that leaves one aghast. Even the illustrious Apuleius, who belonged to the golden age of African literature, the author of The Doctrine of Plato, praises philosophy and the Supreme Being in terms which recall the professions of faith of the chemist and druggist, ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... breathed with a rare exhilaration, born of honest and richly productive toil, the very air of Athens in her glory; and he must have realized sometimes amid the dust and heat of the printing shop that it was given to him at much cost of life and grinding toil to stand upon the threshold of the golden age alike of typography and of the revival of learning. In 1514, the year before his death, Aldus wrote to a friend a letter of which I borrow a translation from George Haven Putnam's Books and Their Makers during the Middle Ages. This is the picture ...
— Printing and the Renaissance - A paper read before the Fortnightly Club of Rochester, New York • John Rothwell Slater
... utter ere the light of his little bark was lost for ever in the darkness of the night. But an expedition sent by his brother-in-law, Sir Walter Raleigh, explored Pamlico Sound; and the country they discovered, a country where in their poetic fancy "men lived after the manner of the Golden Age," received from Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen, the name ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... out from the minds of men, and if they were ever thought of by the farmers in drab greatcoats, who shook the grain out of their sample-bags and buzzed over it in the full market-place, it was as a state of things that belonged to a past golden age when prices were high. Surely the time was gone forever when the broad river could bring up unwelcome ships; Russia was only the place where the linseed came from,—the more the better,—making grist for the great vertical millstones with their scythe-like arms, ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... the duke, my brother, to conduct us, So early in the year, to this retreat. Here we possess ourselves, here we may dream Uninterrupted hours—dream ourselves back Into the golden age which poets sing. I love this Belriguardo; I have here Pass'd many youthful, many happy days; And the fresh green, and this bright sun, recall The feelings of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... feel fluttered too, be conscious of blushing too—in fact, look and feel as foolish as if he had been taken by surprise instead of meeting just what he expected. Poor things! It was a pity they were not in that golden age of childhood when they would have stood face to face, eyeing each other with timid liking, then given each other a little butterfly kiss, and toddled off to play together. Arthur would have gone home to his silk-curtained ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... hearers had heard at mission schools now suddenly appeared, not as the white man's learning, but as God's message to His own. Laputa fitted the key to the cipher, and the meaning was clear. He concluded, I remember, with a picture of the overthrow of the alien, and the golden age which would dawn for the oppressed. Another Ethiopian empire would arise, so majestic that the white man everywhere would dread its name, so righteous that all men under it would live in ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... is in itself, like the so-called real world, null and void; and as it can attain a meaning only by action, by error, by knowledge, by the convulsions of the will, it wears a character of insipid stupidity. A golden age of innocence, a fools' paradise, is a notion that is stupid and unmeaning, and for that very reason in no way worthy of any respect. The first criminal and murderer, Cain, who acquired a knowledge of guilt, and through guilt acquired a knowledge of virtue by repentance, ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... many of their religious beliefs and customs; hence, the serpent probably lost its initial and simple symbolical meaning, and stood for something higher and more ethical during the reign of the great Pharaohs, and the Golden Age of the Greeks and Latins. I am positive, however, that the snake's original significance was wholly phallic in character, and that its adoption as a symbol was simple and material, as I explain ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... that inspired you had its noble side; a great wickedness was shown to you, and you threw yourselves upon it to root it out, in a very fine spirit. Only you seem to think that there is only one wickedness in the world, and, that when that has been purged away, we shall all return to the Golden Age. The same thing happened at the time of the Dreyfus Case; all the well-meaning people of Europe—I among them—seemed never to have heard before of the condemnation of an innocent man. They were terribly upset by it, and they turned the world inside out to wash off the impurity. ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... left at the age of thirteen by the death of his father with the responsibilities of a man, it is no wonder that he "retained only painful recollections of the whole period which ought to be, with every child, a golden age to look back upon."[165] ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... my dear count," I replied, "that, theoretically speaking, your system strikes me as sublime, and calculated to bring about the return of the Golden Age; but I am afraid it would prove absurd in practice. No doubt you are a man of courage, but I am sure you would never let your mistress be enjoyed by another man. Here are twenty-five sequins. I will wager that amount that you will not allow me ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... Victor? Does not his name stand, to all time, as the emperor of good letters? Is an Augustan age a less precise and potential phrase for a golden age of the arts, than a Saturnian age for the same of the virtues? And why is Antony beaten? Surely, because he represents the collective Antony-Lumpkinism of literature. And what has the dear Cleopatra to do in the fight? The meretricious gipsy—the word is Virgil's ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... Roger Bacon, of notoriety on account of his superior knowledge of physics, was the bright Christian light of the thirteenth century. From this century all the way through the reformation the revival of faith in God was the revival of the golden age of learning or literature. When faith in God expired in France the entire social fabric steadily declined until all crumbled and fell as in the ruins of an earthquake. At the same time the inhabitants, loosened from ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 11, November, 1880 • Various
... golden age of the therapeutic use of relics was from the sixth to the sixteenth centuries, modern times, with its physicians, hospitals, and drugs, has not been deprived of this method of cure. Mackay, writing in the latter half of the past century, touches ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... this agricultural expansion there has been an era of discovery in the Dominion unequalled even by the golden age of '49. Alexander {463} Macdonald, a Scotchman from New Brunswick, found a fortune in the great Klondike rush of 1894-8 and other Canadians did the same at Cobalt, Ontario, in 1903, where a member of a railway construction gang picked up a silver nugget by accident, thereby disclosing ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... full-measure service. You, Mrs. Transley—you teach your little boy that he must not steal. As he grows older simply widen your definition of theft to include receiving value without giving value in exchange. When all the mothers begin teaching that principle the golden age which Mr. Murdoch inquires ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... abilities, the extent, diversity and usefulness of his labors, and that restless, impatient and feverish activity which has kept him so long and so eminently conspicuous in affairs, he will be regarded by the next ages as one of the most remarkable personages in the age now closing—the second golden age of England. Lord Brougham is of a Cumberland family, but was born in Edinburgh (where his father had married a niece of the historian Robertson), on the 19th of September, 1779. He was educated at the University of his ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... lance and prudent lore, Shall once again to widowed Italy Her ancient praise and fame in arms restore; And in her realms just lords shall seated be, (Such Numa and Augustus were of yore), Who with their government, benign and sage, Shall re-create on earth the golden age. ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... To the dramatic form belong his two most important long poems. 'Prometheus Unbound' partly follows AEschylus in treating the torture of the Titan who is the champion or personification of Mankind, by Zeus, whom Shelley makes the incarnation of tyranny and on whose overthrow the Golden Age of Shelleyan anarchy succeeds. The poem is a lyrical drama, more on the Greek than on the English model. There is almost no action, and the significance lies first in the lyrical beauty of the profuse choruses and second in the complete embodiment ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... wives were unable to throw off the restrictions of the laws which kept them at home, the great number of hetera, or stranger women, were the glory of the "Golden Age." The homes of these women who were free from the burden of too many children became the gathering places of philosophers, poets, sculptors and statesmen. The hetera were their companions, their inspiration and their ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... drug, a world-wide commerce, such as had never been dreamed of, had become an every-day concern, the arts and sciences and a most generous culture in famous schools and universities, which had been founded in the midst of tumult and bloodshed, characterized the republic, and the golden age of English poetry, which was to make the Elizabethan era famous through ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... which we are following, the young men of America were solving the political questions and preparing for the military struggles of the American Revolution. France was in the glow of hope which made even Louis XVI. himself suppose that a golden age was come again for Frenchmen. In England the protest against form and authority showed itself in signs as easily read as the letters of Junius and the Wilkes riots in London. The autocracy attempted by poor George III., in an attempt which cost him America, was only the most ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... vegetables, whose external appearance is always before our eyes. He not only humanizes whatever attracts his attention, but he looks through a refining medium of his own personality. He has the gift of Midas to bring back the Golden Age for us. Who besides Homer has been able to describe a chariot-race, and who but Hawthorne could extract such ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... importance to observe," adds Mr. Courthope, "is that, even after the introduction of Greek culture, Cato's educational ideal was felt to be the foundation of Roman greatness by the orators and poets who adorned the golden age of Latin literature." The civic spirit was at once the motive and vitalising force of Cicero's eloquence, and still acts as its antiseptic. It breaks through the conventional forms of Virgil's Eclogues and Georgics, and declares itself exultantly in such ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... it will be then for the evolved men to help one another under those so much freer conditions! The possibilities that open before the mind are as glorious vistas stretching in all directions, so that our seventh round should indeed be a veritable golden age. Well for us that these grand faculties will not be possessed by all humanity until it has evolved to a far higher level in morality as well as in wisdom, else should we but repeat once more under still worse conditions the terrible downfall of the great Atlantean civilization, whose ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... is called the Golden Age, when the rivers flowed with milk and wine, and yellow honey dripped from oak-trees. Their childhood would probably have lasted forever; but the Silver Age came on, and every thing was changed. Then, it was sometimes too warm, and sometimes too cold. People began to live in caves, ...
— Fairy Book • Sophie May
... territory. The islanders of Hispaniola, in my opinion, may be esteemed more fortunate than were the Latins, above all should they become converted to the true religion. They go naked, they know neither weights nor measures, nor that source of all misfortunes, money; living in a golden age, without laws, without lying judges, without books, satisfied with their life, and in no wise solicitous for the future. Nevertheless ambition and the desire to rule trouble even them, and they fight ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... household of Venetia when a child, that she had never cried; not a single tear had ever sullied that sunny face. Surrounded by scenes of innocence, and images of happiness and content, Venetia smiled on a world that smiled on her, the radiant heroine of a golden age. She had, indeed, wept over the sorrows and the departure of Cadurcis; but those were soft showers of sympathy and affection sent from a warm heart, like drops from a summer sky. But now this grief was agony: her brow throbbed, her hand was clenched, ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... lines which I had assigned her: "To you it is decreed to find Apollo and to bring back the Golden Age." ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... sixteenth century, to have been a king, to have had Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands as a birthright, and not to have been inspired with a spark of that fire which glowed so intensely in those favored lands and in that golden age, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... No golden age lasts long. Before 350, probably in 343, Constans had to cross the Channel and repel the Picts and other assailants.[1] After 368 such aid was more often and more urgently required. Significantly enough, ...
— The Romanization of Roman Britain • F. Haverfield
... During this new golden age, several literary tendencies and genres may be observed. But Romanticism remained the most lasting and potent literary force for about a century. However, one of the characteristics of the Icelandic literature of later ages is the infrequent manifestation ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... successful form of trade to resort to any means, however base, to secure profits. Let not too much ignominy be cast upon their memories; they were but creatures of their time; and their time was not that "golden age," so foolishly pictured, but a wild, tempestuous, contending struggle in which every man was at the throat of his fellowman, and in a vortex which statesmen, college professors, editors, political economists, all praised and sanctified as ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... psychological toy you suggest, and you would watch them grow, not into the outside world, but into themselves. They would fester. Man has been expelled from the Garden. His history is a long, painful climb toward something different. It is something that is probably better than the soft and flabby Golden Age. If man were to return, he would regress, become worse than static, become infantile or even embryonic. He would be smothered in the folds of his ...
— They Twinkled Like Jewels • Philip Jose Farmer
... numbered fourteen hundred. The gold boom in California was still at fever heat. Every craft that set sail for the Isthmus by the Nicaragua or Panama route, or by the weary route around Cape Horn, was packed full of gold-seekers. It was the Golden Age of the Argonauts; and, if my memory serves me well, there were no reserved ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... reign of Wouter Van Twiller, celebrated in many a long forgotten song as the real golden age, the rest being nothing but counterfeit copper-washed coin. In that delightful period a sweet and holy calm reigned over the whole province. The burgomaster smoked his pipe in peace; the substantial solace of his domestic cares, after her daily toils were done, sat ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... period of the Six Dynasties (from A.D. 221 to A.D. 618) was the golden age of Buddhism, when the science and philosophy of India enriched the Chinese mind, and the wealth of the country was lavished on Buddhist temples and monasteries. The faith of Shaka became nearly universal and the Buddhists led in philosophy and literature, founding a native ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... period which may be described as the Golden Age of the modern Jews. The religious persecutions of this race by the Mohammedans were confined within the borders of Arabia. The Prophet was content with enforcing uniformity of worship within the sacred peninsula which gave him birth. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... shadows before across the page of "The Seasons." Thomson's denunciation of the slave trade, and of cruelty to animals, especially the caging of birds and the coursing of hares; his preference of country to town; his rhapsodies on domestic love and the innocence of the Golden Age; his contrast between the misery of the poor and the heartless luxury of the rich; all these features of the poem foretoken the sentimentalism of Sterne and Goldsmith, and the humanitarianism of Cowper and Burns. They anticipate, in particular, that half affected itch of simplicity which ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... of the "golden age," the "silver age," and the "iron age," but were they to celebrate this, I think they should call it the flimsy age, for every thing seems made to suit a temporary purpose, without any regard to the sound and substantial. From printed calico to printed books, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 331, September 13, 1828 • Various
... toilsome race, Is raised within this favourable clime, In physical and mental power apace With those of any land, and any time, Save in the golden age, that age of thought sublime; But, what I mean is this: that her own men Do act their parts, they reason or they rhyme Within their bounds, with keen, far-reaching ken, For those who late have left the axe to wield ...
— Canada and Other Poems • T.F. Young
... ancestress of several noble families, and she is supposed to be the same as the industrious queen of the same name, the mythical mother of Charlemagne, whose era has become proverbial, for in speaking of the Golden Age in France and Germany it is customary to say, "in the ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... by the score, each fair As Hebe, as voluptuous as Venus, All thinly clad as in the golden age, I could not wish a chaster keeper of them. Nay, had I wives in droves like Solomon, I'd make thee Kislah Aga of my harem, Chief eunuch and sole security—What! Call me satyr when I urge in bounds The boundless beauties of pure maidenhood, And ...
— The Scarlet Stigma - A Drama in Four Acts • James Edgar Smith
... the first emperor of the Chou dynasty; as emperor he took for his exemplar one of the mythical emperors of ancient China; of his new laws he claimed that they were simply revivals of decrees of the golden age. In all this he appealed to the authority of literature that had been tampered with to suit his aims. Actually, such laws had never before been customary; either Wang Mang completely misinterpreted passages ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... custom is graceful and poetical; and the world hardly presents a more charming spectacle—at once so simple and so touching—as the installation of a rosiere in some sequestered village of France. The associations connected with it are pure and bright enough for a Golden Age. All who take part in the little ceremony are humble people, living by their labour; the queen of the day is queen by reason of her industry and virtue; they who do her such becoming and encouraging homage, old and young, lead lowly and toilsome lives, and yet have the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 427 - Volume 17, New Series, March 6, 1852 • Various
... years Wendell Phillips was the crowned king of the lecture platform. It was the golden age of the lyceum. Men had more leisure than to-day. Our era of the drama, music, and travel pictures had not yet come. The winter nights were long, books few, magazines had not yet developed, and the people were hungry ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... and truer hearts, aye," answered Prometheus, "but of this I can have no knowledge. It seems from thy tale to have begun but ill. Yet Saturn mutilated his father, and his reign was the Golden Age." ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... of the ordinary Asiatic government at almost all times and in all places as 'a grinding military despotism' is correct. Sentimental persons in both India and England are apt to forget this weighty truth. The golden age of India, excepting, perhaps, the Gupta period between A.D. 330 and 455, is as mythical as that of Ireland. What Persia now is, that would India be, if she had been ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... extent in England too. Pope could write, "The state of nature was the reign of God." Instead of a forward movement the business of man was to recover the lost happiness of the childhood of the world, to bring back a golden age of liberty and equality. Locke's "state of peace, goodwill, mutual assistance, and preservation" is to be the desire of nations, and with wistful yearning Rousseau's disciples gazed on the picture painted ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... the golden age of science and literature in Timbuctoo. Her scholars with the University of Sankore as a center had so generously contributed to the world's thought that they had brought to that country no less fame than its statesmen ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... fell under the spell of Titian. This was the period of the series of splendid portraits of noble Italian families which are to this day the pride of Genoa. Here too belong those lovely Madonna pictures which brought back for a time the golden age of Venetian art. ...
— Van Dyck - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... instantaneously, eternally, and infinitely changing. Of what the world has been, through this series of never beginning never ending mutation, she can form nothing more than conjecture: yet she cannot but think that the golden age is a supposition treated at present with ridicule it does not deserve. By the laws of necessity, mind, unless counteracted by accidents beyond its control, is continually progressive in improvement. With some such accidents we are tolerably well acquainted. ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... delight in the beauty of their heads, the wonderful symmetry of their limbs strengthened by athletic games, and the supple grace of most of them, that he felt as if some magic spell had carried him back to the golden age of Greece and the days of the Olympian ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... uninhabited island, situate upon an unknown coast near the antipodes of Europe; nor can anything be more consonant to the feelings, if pelicans have any, than quietly to resign their breath whilst surrounded by their progeny, and in the same spot where they first drew it. Alas, for the pelicans! their golden age is past; but it has much exceeded in duration ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... long harangue (which might very well have been spared) our knight delivered because the acorns they gave him reminded him of the golden age; and the whim seized him to address all this unnecessary argument to the goatherds, who listened to him gaping in amazement without saying a word in reply. Sancho likewise held his peace and ate acorns, and paid repeated visits to the second wine-skin, which they had hung up on a cork ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... of Callippus, an Athenian, and Pharax, a Lacedaemonian captain, both of whom, after giving out that the design of their coming was to introduce liberty and depose tyrants, so tyrannized themselves, that the reign of former oppressors seemed to be a golden age in comparison, and the Sicilians began to consider those more happy who had expired in servitude, than any that had lived to ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... ease they led here more sweet to them than the pomp and uneasy splendour of a courtier's life. Here they lived like the old Robin Hood of England, and to this forest many noble youths daily resorted from the court, and did fleet the time carelessly, as they did who lived in the golden age. In the summer they lay along under the fine shade of the large forest trees, marking the playful sports of the wild deer; and so fond were they of these poor dappled fools, who seemed to be the native inhabitants of the forest, that it grieved them to be forced to kill them to supply ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... great figure that filled the berth above him, now deeply slumbering, had in him subterraneans that gave access not only to Greece, but far beyond that haunted land, to a state of existence symbolized in the legends of the early world by Eden and the Golden Age.... ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... snow and ice; a warm, wet and foggy atmosphere, with great drops falling constantly from the twigs of the trees and the drenched, black eaves of the houses. It is a time for macintoshes and sound rubbers; a golden age for patent cough mixtures and freckles, the sworn destroyer of artificial curls and long clothes. It is true that a glad, golden sunshine floods the earth at times, but what of that, when sullied, muddy streams are rushing and bubbling on with a roaring speed, ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... pressure from without is enormous, and the bulwarks of our ridiculous and tyrannical constitution must give way. King, lords, and aristocrats; landholders, tithe-collectors, church and state, thank God, will soon be overthrown, and the golden age revived—the millennium, the true millennium—not what your poor mother talked about. I am at the head of twenty-nine societies, and if my health lasts, you will see what I will accomplish now that I have your assistance, Jack;" and Mr Easy's ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Captain Frederick Marryat
... opportunity that, well saved, might have proved happily ridiculous against them; and this was Mr. Law's description of the real state of India, even from its first discovery by Alexander, opposed to Mr. Burke's flourishing representation, of its golden age, its lambs and tigers associating, ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... advance upon him in threatening guise, but always retire or dissipate harmlessly if boldly faced. It is to this curious tendency that the distorted or unpleasant aspect above mentioned must be referred, and mediaeval writers tell us that man has only himself to thank for its existence. In the golden age before this Kaliyuga men were on the whole less selfish and more spiritual, and then the "elementals" were friendly, though now they are no longer so because of man's indifference to, and want of sympathy with, other living beings. From the wonderful ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... of human experience the seasons are all mingled as in the golden age: fruit and blossom hang together; in the same moment the sickle is reaping and the seed is sprinkled; one tends the green cluster and another treads the winepress. Nay, in each of our lives harvest and spring-time are continually ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot |
