"Middle age" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... for the first tune revealed the man's features. A fine brow, upstanding thick and wavy hair, and the clearest of gray eyes suddenly took twenty years from the age at first made probable by the heavy beard. With the helmet pulled low this was late middle age; now bareheaded it was only bearded youth. Nevertheless at the corners of the eyes were certain wrinkles, and in the eyes themselves a direct competent steadiness that was something apart from the usual ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... the banking house were thrown open, and a gentleman of perhaps a little more than middle age stepped lightly into the corridor, where the boys awaited his arrival. He had a kindly face, and a sharp but pleasant ...
— The Boy Broker - Among the Kings of Wall Street • Frank A. Munsey
... of this smith is variously given as Weland, Wieland, Welland, Volundr, Velint etc. The story is found in the Vilkina Saga, and was one of the most popular of middle age myths. (See Grimm's Mythology.) Sir Walter Scott, in his novel of Kenilworth, has made use of this legend in introducing ...
— The Story of Siegfried • James Baldwin
... her surroundings. The note of fatality jarred on the harmony of this well-ordered life. It was preposterous, that she, who had always been hedged round and sheltered by pomp and circumstance, should now in her middle age be menaced with calamity. She dragged herself over to one of the long mirrors and gazed ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... he, 'I am, as you know, at middle age, yet a bachelor, and the reason, to be plain with you, is that I have not believed in women. Pardon me, I would not be rude, but I am a business man. I have no delusions left, yet it has occurred to me that a young woman who would make the lives of the saints her rule of life—I do ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... allowed here to assume a mildly allegorical meaning. If the cool of the evening may do the same, it will serve very well to express the stage of life and of feeling to which no more than the beginning of middle age had brought her. It was rather absurd, but she did not want to do or feel very much more; and it seemed as though her wishes were to be respected. A certain distance from things marked her now; only Harry was near to her, only Harry's triumph ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... Paula Ray and a tall, tough-looking man of middle age were around the table and had ...
— The Stars, My Brothers • Edmond Hamilton
... saw the person who spoke. He was a decent looking man, of middle age, dressed in a sailor's habit. Alonzo had often heard of the generosity and honourable conduct of the British tars: he therefore approached him and told him his real case, not even concealing his being taken in actual hostility to the British government, and his escape from ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.
... half an hour to wait for the arrival of the steamer. Among the passengers who crossed the plank from the steamer to the pier was a gentleman of middle age, and a boy about a year younger than Ben. The boy had a carpet-bag in his hand; the father, for such appeared to be the relationship, carried a heavy valise, besides ...
— Ben, the Luggage Boy; - or, Among the Wharves • Horatio Alger
... prevented a continuance of the song; and the breakdown attracted the attention of a firm-standing man of middle age, who kept each corner of his crescent-shaped mouth rigorously drawn back into his cheek, as if to do away with any suspicion of mirthfulness which might ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... with his confessor and private chaplain, Father Ricardo, a man of middle age, middle height, attenuated form, round head with coarse black hair, piercing dark eyes, aquiline nose somewhat thick, and the loose mouth characteristic of devout Roman Catholics, High Church people, and others ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... and emotion from which no lessons may be learned—calm, stagnant pools of superlative surface pleasure. No one learns things worth while when he is too happy or too successful. That is why success is a wiser and more enduring thing when it comes at middle age. The young man or woman has not been tried out, has not had to struggle and discover personal limitations. It's the struggle that brings ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... Johnson, the senior clerk, met us at the office and received us with that respect which my companion's card always commanded. He was a thin, gruff, bespectacled man of middle age, his cheeks haggard, and his hands twitching from the nervous strain to which he had ...
— The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans • Arthur Conan Doyle
... by Davis, the butler, a respectable looking man of middle age, and Mr. Sydney, from time to time, glanced furtively from his wife to this man, with a ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... a fig-stalk for her, should shape her mind to its native bent, and to my perfect happiness. It was not my place to say much, lest I should appear to use an improper and selfish influence. And of course to all men of common sense, and to everybody of middle age (who must know best what is good for youth), the thoughts which my Lorna entertained would be ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... Cedarville, Ohio, May 25, 1854, about noon, "a colored man, of middle age and respectable appearance, was walking on the Columbus and Xenia turnpike. He was alone. A man in a buggy overtook him, and invited him to ride, saying he was a friend to the colored man, and promising to assist him in obtaining his liberty." ...
— The Fugitive Slave Law and Its Victims - Anti-Slavery Tracts No. 18 • American Anti-Slavery Society
... the family at Venice, until one of the children, in his mischievous play, got hold of them and tore them up. This child was Antonio's great-great-great-grandson, Nicolo, born in 1515. When this young Nicolo had come to middle age, and was a member of the Council of Ten, he happened to come across some remnants of these documents, and then all at once he remembered with grief how he had, in his boyhood, pulled them to pieces.[281] ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... gold, 220 And another and another, and faster and faster, Till, dimpling to blindness, the wide water rolled; Then it so chanced that the Duke our master Asked himself what were the pleasures in season, And found, since the calendar bade him be hearty, 225 He should do the Middle Age no treason In resolving on a hunting-party. Always provided, old books showed the way of it! What meant old poets by their strictures? And when old poets had said their say of it, 230 How taught old painters in their pictures? We must revert to the proper channels, ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... the full force of the term, especially as applied invidiously. The streets, narrow, tortuous, and dirty, have very wide cobble-stones; the houses for the most part are shabby, without local colour. The look of things is neither modern nor antique—a kind of mediocrity of middle age. There is an enormous number of blank walls—walls of gardens, of courts, of private houses—that avert themselves from the street as if in natural chagrin at there being so little to see. Round about is a dull, flat, featureless country, on which the ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... which bore these words painted upon a shingle: "Entertainment for Man and Beast." They were obliged to stop there for the night, Sage's strength being exhausted. They entered the cabin and found its owner and sole occupant there, a rugged and sturdy and simple-hearted man of middle age. He cooked supper and placed it before the travellers—salt junk, boiled beans, corn bread and black coffee. Sage's stomach could abide nothing but the most delicate food, therefore this banquet revolted him, and he sat at the table unemployed, while Harris ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... gardens beyond the river woods, and duly cleared off my indebtednesses for the same with a varied assortment of articles ranging from gladioli bulbs, which seem to multiply by cube root here, to a pair of curling tongs, an article long coveted by a simple-minded woman of more than middle age, for the resuscitation of her Sunday front locks, and which though willing to acquire by barter she, as a deacon's wife, had a prejudice against buying ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... and origin of the middle age institution of celibacy among the clergy. It was intended to check the tendency to secularize benefices. It was adapted to the condition of a church militant. It might do good, or at least it could do little harm, where aged ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... for the speaker. It struck me that this was a symptom of genuine interest in the politics of his region not likely to be shown in similar circumstances by many English or American farmers. He was a man of middle age, with the quiet, self-possessed carriage, general among his class in all parts of France, and received us, in the large and neatly-furnished best room of his old-fashioned and very comfortable house, with frank and simple courtesy. On the walls hung a ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... rare biographical details which, as has been explained, may "force the consigne" here, is that Beyle in his youth, and almost up to middle age, was acquainted with an old lady who had the very unenviable reputation of having actually "sat for" ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... knowledge of the traditions and ancient customs of his people than any other person now living. This superior knowledge was strikingly apparent in the course of the investigations which were made respecting the sign language. Two other members of his tribe, well-educated and very intelligent men of middle age, the one a chief and government interpreter, the other a clergyman now settled over a white congregation, had both been consulted on the subject and both expressed the opinion that nothing of the sign language, properly speaking, was known among the Six Nations. They were alike surprised and ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... indeed, there being no Middle Age precedents to crystallize into established customs, the treatment accorded the insane had seldom or never sunk to this level. Partly for this reason, perhaps, the work of Dr. Rush at the Philadelphia Hospital, in 1784, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... his bidding, and presently they returned, bringing with them a man of magnificent appearance and middle age, whose left arm had been broken by a blow from a kerry. With his right hand he saluted first the king, then the Prince Nodwengo, a kindly-faced, mild-eyed man, in whose ...
— The Wizard • H. Rider Haggard
... how much less strange those ideas appear now than they did when they were first put out some fifty years ago. One of the most remarkable changes that has taken place during the lives of men who are still of middle age has been in the opinion of advanced thinkers about the function of Government. In the early days of Carlyle the whole set, or lie, of opinion in England was towards cutting in all directions the bands of Government control, diminishing as much as possible the sphere ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... in greater or lesser degrees, work powerfully together to make the citizen. They work most powerfully, of course, in those plastic unsettled years that last from adolescence to the middle twenties, but often in very slowly diminishing intensity right into the closing decades of middle age. However things may have been in the quieter past when newspapers did not exist, when creeds were rigid, plays mere spectacles to be seen only "in Town," and books rare, the fact remains that to-day everybody ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... for the youth and virile middle age that dealt with them on the rare occasions when a timely blow was loosed. Then they had proof that from that strange, mad country overseas there came men who could lead men—men who could strike, and who knew enough to hold their hands when the sudden ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... looked over into the gay little garden. As we looked, we became conscious of what appeared like a heap or bundle of clothing near one of the beds, which, on lifting itself up, proved to be a tall slender lady of middle age, who, with her dress tucked neatly round her, a big print hood on her head, and a trowel in her hand, was busily administering such tender little attentions as mothers will lavish on their children, and garden lovers on their flowers. She was ...
— Mrs. Overtheway's Remembrances • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... very close indeed to Phidias; his art is more complete and less perfect. But three hundred years have gone since the death of Michael Angelo, and to get another like him the world would have to be steeped in the darkness of another Middle Age. And, passing on in our inquiry, we notice that painting reached its height immediately after Michael Angelo's death. Who shall rival the splendours, the profusion of Veronese, the opulence of Tintoretto, the richness of Titian, the pomp of Rubens? Or who shall ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... of Michael the Stammerer, was one of the most active and high-spirited princes who reigned at Constantinople during the middle age. In offensive or defensive war, he marched in person five times against the Saracens, formidable in his attack, esteemed by the enemy in his losses and defeats. In the last of these expeditions he penetrated into Syria, and besieged the obscure town of Sozopetra; ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... of middle age, a stout man with a florid countenance and dewy blue eyes; his skin was of that quality that is easily roughened by the wind. He always ...
— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung
... wound on his left breast. I didn't even know at the moment the man was my father; though slowly, afterward, by the concurrent testimony of others, I learnt to call him so. But his relationship wasn't part of the Picture to me. There, he was only in my eyes a man—a man well past middle age, with a long white beard, now dabbled with the thick blood that kept gurgling so hatefully from the red spot in his waistcoat. He lay on his back, half-curled round toward one arm, exactly as he fell. And the revolver he had been shot with ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... the companion seat rode a man of middle age, bearded, roughly dressed, who took keen interest in my destination. He was located, I learned, over the Continental Divide in that vast region beyond Grand Lake. He talked of the forests of uncut ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... old. It seems to me that I have entered a new period of my life: my youth lies behind me, I am advanced into middle age, and I well know what both this and my husband have a right to demand from me. May a new and stronger being awake in me! May God support me, and Ernst be ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... native boat was seen rounding the point at the harbor's southern extremity, and after a few minutes it drew alongside the Ithaca. There were but three men in it—two Dyaks and a Malay. The latter was a tall, well built man of middle age, of a sullen and degraded countenance. His garmenture was that of the ordinary Malay boatman, but there was that in his mien and his attitude toward his companions which belied ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Normanstand had remained a bachelor until close on middle age, when the fact took hold of him that there was no immediate heir to his great estate. Whereupon, with his wonted decision, he set about looking ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... soft murmur of Ume's words. An instant later, heavy footsteps, belonging evidently to a wearer of foreign shoes, came around by the side of the house toward the garden. Kano looked up, frowning with annoyance. A fine-looking man of middle age ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... memory of youth in middle age! It's a pity, for it destroys their influence. In the end, however, it is the young people who decide. ... These two ought to know their own minds, for it has not been a hurried affair. They have known each other for years, and have been more and more attracted. That is a duty which ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... melted into his middle age, the conflict between the outer and inner spirit decreased. He was still, as ever, conscious of the coldness of his inner heart; but he grew to believe that a compromise was possible, and that his work was to cheer and welcome, with all the outer resources at ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... story, though scarcely less, is of a widely different kind. In Troilus, as has been said, the Middle Age is working on scarcely more than the barest hints of antiquity, which it amplifies and supplements out of its own head and its own heart—a head which can dream dream-webs of subtlest texture unknown to the ancients, and a heart which can throb and bleed in a fashion hardly shown ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... keenest eye only ten feet away, but the faces of the chiefs outlined against the blazing firelight were so clearly visible to him that he could see every change of expression. They were fine-looking men, all of middle age, tall, lean, their noses hooked, features cut clean and strong, and their heads shaved, all except the defiant scalp lock, into which the feather of an eagle was twisted. Their bodies were draped ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Had he concluded from this that God, in order to occupy this exceptional position, must be pure matter (or substance), he would have reached the standpoint of Spinoza. As it is, he stands entirely alone in the Middle Age, in making the world the product of Will, and not of Intelligence, as the Schoolmen and the classical philosophers ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... mockery, for instance, in you to visit the fever-stricken cottage, while your husband leaves it in a state which breeds that fever. Your business is to go to him and say, "HERE IS A WRONG; RIGHT IT!" This, as many a beautiful Middle Age legend tells us, has been woman's function in all uncivilised times; not merely to melt man's heart to pity, but to awaken it to duty. But the man must see that the woman is in earnest: that if he will not repair the wrong by justice, she will, if possible (as in those old legends), ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... which HIS LORDSHIP felt in consequence of his many wounds, was a slight rheumatic affection of the stump of his amputated arm on any sudden variation in the state of the weather; which is generally experienced by those who have the misfortune to lose a limb after the middle age. HIS LORDSHIP usually predicted an alteration in the weather with as much certainty from feeling transient pains in this stump, as he could by his marine barometer; from the indications of which ...
— The Death of Lord Nelson • William Beatty
... till we come to Middle Age Europe, and we find a down-trodden proletariat, an indifferent and luxurious kingship and priesthood, allied now to oppress, not to raise. Therefore, contest between the Church and the State, until the Pontiff of Rome remained the only representative ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... have told all this to her husband—was it her duty to tell him now? Again and again the question recurred to her, full of endless perplexities. She and Dr. Grey were not like two young people of equal years. Why trouble him, a man of middle age, with what he might think a silly, girlish love-story? and, above all, why wound him by what is the sharpest pain to a loving heart, the sudden discovery of things hitherto concealed, but which ought to have been told long ago? He might feel it thus—or thus—she could not tell; she ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... Loisel ruled with her cash register at the cigar counter. She, bursting with sweet inner fatness like a California nectarine, kept in her middle age the everlasting charm and chic of the Frenchwoman. This Madame Loisel was a dual personality. She of the grave mouth, the considering eye, the business manner, who rung up dinner fees on the cash register and bargained with ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... a little past middle age, tall and thin and not unlike Randy in the general appearance of his face. He was not a strong man, and the winter before had been laid up with ...
— Randy of the River - The Adventures of a Young Deckhand • Horatio Alger Jr.
... solemnly bound to avenge the blood of any of their brethren, unlawfully slain. So that the repulsive repetition of reprisals, which so disgusts the modern reader in our old annals, is by no means a phenomenon peculiar to the Irish state of society. It was in the middle age and in early times common to all Europe, to Britain and Germany, as well as to Greece and Rome. It was, doubtless, under a sense of duty of this sort that Hugh V. led into Leinster a large army (A.D. 733), ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... lifted out of the buggy, carried up a flight of steps, and then a flood of light flashed through the fingers upon her closed eyelids. Dr. Hartwell placed his change on a sofa, and rank the bell. The summons was promptly answered by a negro woman of middle age. She stood at the door awaiting the order, but his eyes were bent on the floor, and ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... earth, he ascended up on high, leading a multitude of captives." What can be plainer than that? The same thought is also contained in another passage, a passage which was the source of those tremendous pictures so frequent in the cathedrals of the Middle Age, Christus spoliat Infernum: "God hath forgiven you all trespasses, blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, and took it away, nailing it to Christ's cross; and, having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a show of them, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... female, whose blooming days had passed; she was introduced as his wife; her head was decorated with a fillet of white feathers; the upper part of her body was exposed, but she wore a mat round the waist which descended to the ankles; the chief was apparently a man of middle age. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, No. - 537, March 10, 1832 • Various
... thousand out of millions—favoured by their own characters and by happy circumstance, and only then after much labour, have understanding of imaginative things, and yet "the imagination is the man himself." The churches in the Middle Age won all the arts into their service because men understood that when imagination is impoverished, a principal voice—some would say the only voice—for the awakening of wise hope and durable faith, and understanding ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats
... Isabel and her companion Heads of Households sat with it as their focal point, and thought, as they saw the players flitting to and fro between the showers, and the house, and the lawn tennis grounds, that middle age had privileges that were not to ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... —not as an Established Church, but a go-as-you-please one; and the other project was to get a decree issued by and by, commanding that upon Arthur's death unlimited suffrage should be introduced, and given to men and women alike—at any rate to all men, wise or unwise, and to all mothers who at middle age should be found to know nearly as much as their sons at twenty-one. Arthur was good for thirty years yet, he being about my own age—that is to say, forty—and I believed that in that time I could easily have ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... learned something about the couple who had preceded us in the use of these rooms. They were of middle age and of great personal elegance, but uncertain pay, the husband being nothing more nor less than a professional gambler. ...
— The Gray Madam - 1899 • Anna Katharine Green (Mrs. Charles Rohlfs)
... which never show anyone coming who can rouse the slightest interest in the mind, the endless years and days which pass and pass, carrying away the bloom, extinguishing the lights of youth, bringing a dreary middle age before which the very soul shrinks, while yet the sufferer feels how strong is the current of life in her own veins, and how capable she is of all the active duties of existence—this was the essence and soul of the existence she knew ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... her earlier years, when she was young and strong and impetuous, she deserved far different words than these. The portrait of her by Zucchero, which now hangs in Hampton Court, depicts her when she must have been of more than middle age; and still the face is one of beauty, though it be a strange and almost artificial beauty—one that draws, attracts, and, perhaps, lures ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... a critical moment in life when middle age awakens a man from the illusions that have been crowning the earlier years with inward glory. Some are contemptuously willing to let the vision and the dream pass into easy oblivion, while they hasten to make up for lost time in close pursuit of the main ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 5: On Pattison's Memoirs • John Morley
... was almost exactly like its fellows, neither better nor worse; and the door was opened by a neat, prim woman, small, and of middle age. Commonplace she was, no doubt, but not commonplace ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... the great life motif of her existence;" that the sentiment of the ideal life is none other than man's normal life as we shall one day know it. Matthew Arnold saw George Sand in his enthusiastic youth when she was in the serenity and dignity of middle age ...
— Cobwebs of Thought • Arachne
... when Luke entered the little cottage which he called home. His mother, a pleasant woman of middle age, was spreading the cloth for supper. She looked ...
— Struggling Upward - or Luke Larkin's Luck • Horatio Alger
... that I could devise, endeavoured to convince them that we would do them no harm: They now waved to us, and I was willing to interpret it as an invitation; but upon our putting the boat in, they came again to oppose us. One appeared to be a youth about nineteen or twenty, and the other a man of middle age: As I had now no other resource, I fired a musquet between them. Upon the report, the youngest dropped a bundle of lances upon the rock, but recollecting himself in an instant he snatched them ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... the gathered harvest? The stakes were high, but the game was worth the playing, and Rosselot played it with spirit and energy unto the last card. His appearance in court is ever memorable, and as his ferret eyes glinted through glass at the President, he seemed the villain of some Middle Age Romance. His head, poised upon a lean, bony frame, was embellished with a nose thin and sharp as the blade of a knife; his tightly compressed lips were an indication of the rascal's determination. 'Long as a day in Lent'—that is how a spectator described ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... under which it was acquired. Schiller had peculiar difficulties to strive with, and his success has likewise been peculiar. Much of his life was deformed by inquietude and disease, and it terminated at middle age; he composed in a language then scarcely settled into form, or admitted to a rank among the cultivated languages of Europe: yet his writings are remarkable for their extent and variety as well as their intrinsic excellence; and his own countrymen are not his only, or perhaps ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... Middle Ages, so far as the Church is concerned at least, takes place under the influence of the ancient tradition, and institutions are established in which the leading elements, taken from ancient life, are not yet transformed by Germanic ideas. The East knew no Middle Age. For a history of the Eastern Church other divisions would have to be made, but in a history in which, for practical reasons, the development is traced in Western Christianity, the affairs of the Eastern Church must be treated as subordinate ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... of Stonehenge, I don't know why. Lady Glenmire came to the rescue of our hostess, and, somehow or other, we found ourselves for the first time placed agreeably, and not formally, in Mrs Jamieson's house. Lady Glenmire, now we had time to look at her, proved to be a bright little woman of middle age, who had been very pretty in the days of her youth, and who was even yet very pleasant-looking. I saw Miss Pole appraising her dress in the first five minutes, and I take her word when she said the ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... told her that it was of Cartoner he had come to speak. While the delicacy and care showed her that he had guessed something, it also opened up a new side to his character. For the susceptibilities of men and women who have passed middle age are usually dull, and often quite dead, to the sensitiveness of younger hearts. It almost seemed that he divined that Wanda's heart was sensitive and sore, like an exposed nerve, though she showed ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... a very goodly person, tall, and singularly well-featured, and all his youth well-favoured, of a sweet aspect, but high-foreheaded, which (as I should take it) was of no discommendation; but towards his latter, and which with old men was but a middle age, he grew high-coloured, so that the Queen had much of her father, for, expecting some of her kindred, and some few that had handsome wits in crooked bodies, she always took personage in the way of election, for the people hath it to this day, KING ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton
... speculation whatsoever. But this was not within the field of Kant's inquiry. What he wished to know was simply the exact stage in the whole course of her development which the Earth at present occupies. Is she still in her infancy, for example, or in a stage corresponding to middle age, or in a stage approaching to superannuation? The idea of Kant presupposed a certain average duration as belonging to a planet of our particular system; and supposing this known, or discoverable, and that a certain assignable development belonged to a planet so circumstanced as ours, ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... bad symptom was his notorious license, which brought from the Empress expressions of the bitterest reproach. Growing old at forty-three, not forty, as Napoleon gallantly but untruthfully wrote to Louis, the aging Creole dismissed from memory the sins of her own youth and middle age, while in jealous fury she charged her husband not only with his adulteries, but with crimes the mere name of which sullies the ordinary records of human wickedness and folly. She would have followed the Emperor to Poland, but his repeated dissuasions, although honeyed, were virtual ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... sped swiftly and tranquilly away. Ernest still dwelt in his native valley, and was now a man of middle age. By slow degrees he had become known among the people. Now, as heretofore, he labored for his bread, and was the same simple-hearted man that he had always been. But he had thought and felt so much, he had given so many of the best hours of his life to unworldly hopes for some great ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... in equipage, the poor arrayed in some gay, inexpensive motley, and crowded into miserable vehicles. The particolored costumes give an aspect of brightness to the street; but it is a solemn sight to see four Cuban women, of the middle age, drawn by a four-in-hand, arrayed in full ball-dress, powdered and bejeweled, and passing in review ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... of age, and his hair was grey, but this grey hair did not impart a look of age to his appearance. His erect figure, the carriage of his head, his dashing, nay, almost swaggering walk, all belonged to a man in the prime of middle age. He wore a beard and thick moustache of grizzled auburn. His nose was aquiline, his forehead high and square, his chin massive. The form of his head and face denoted force of intellect. His long, muscular limbs gave evidence of great physical power. Even the tones of his voice, and his ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... although many years older than her brother, by no means looked so, but presented the pleasant appearance of a mild, rather stout, and comely maiden lady of middle age. Dressed with quaker-like simplicity in dove-coloured silk, with a transparent kerchief of snow-white muslin folded across her bosom, she at once prepossessed the beholder in her favour by an aspect of serenity and peace. Her manners were very quiet and gentle, and her voice ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... Meanwhile the middle age accomplished its own work. Slowly and obscurely, amid stupidity and ignorance, were being forged the nations and the languages of Europe. Italy, France, Spain, England, Germany took shape. The actors of the future drama acquired ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... prematurely aged by toil and hardship. Many of the young girls among the negroes are pretty, with their soft eyes and skin like velvet, their merry laugh and graceful figures. But in a very few years all this disappears, and by middle age they are bent, and wrinkled, and old. All loads are carried by women, with the exception only of hammocks, which are ...
— By Sheer Pluck - A Tale of the Ashanti War • G. A. Henty
... fall to the ground. Youth is past, with its passionate joys and griefs, its restlessness, its vague desires. You have chosen your path, you have rounded out your lot, your duties are before you. Now beware the mediocrity that threatens middle age, its limitation of thought and interest, its dulness of fancy, its too external life, and mental thinness. Remember the limitations that threaten every professional man, only to be guarded against by great earnestness and watchfulness. So take care of yourself, and let not ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... to be observed. It is not well to defer till middle age the period of connubial intercourse; for too tedious spinsterhood is as much calculated to hasten the decay of beauty as too early a marriage. Hence, there is rarely any freshness to be seen in a maiden of thirty; while the matron of that age, if her life has been a happy one, and her hymeneal ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... offended at this ending. "How absurd!" he says. "They are still in the early twenties. The world is all before them, and they have time to fall into all sorts of troubles which the romanticist has not thought of. Middle age is just as dangerous a period as youth, and matrimony has its pitfalls. Let me take up the story and tell you how they didn't live happily ever afterwards, but, on the contrary, had a cat-and-dog ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... frenzied disputation which would shake the social, religious, and scientific worlds to their foundations, and that would certainly not be a pleasant position for an eminent and respected scientist, who was already a certain number of years past middle age—to say nothing of the very real harm ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... the sublime ideal of public right. Education has done for Germany all that Education, divorced from Morality, can do; and the result has been a defeat of civilization and a destruction of human happiness such as Europe has not seen since the Middle Age closed in blood. What shall it profit a nation if it "gain the whole world" ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... you a picture which will please you. The original is in the gallery at Paris. I read a description of it, and have had it copied by the Italian." She showed me the painting, and waited my opinion. It was a picture of a man of middle age, in the old German costume. The expression was dreamy and resigned, and so characteristic that no one could doubt this man once lived. The whole tone of the picture in the foreground was dark and brownish; but in the ...
— Memories • Max Muller
... navy, who seventy years ago, after ten years of study in Tahiti, wrote his conclusions, said that after him it would be useless to hunt in the memories of the living for anything of the past, for the old men were dead or dying, and those now in middle age did not even speak or understand the old language in which the records were told. He had, he said, arrived in Tahiti when the real Tahiti, the Tahiti of the true native, the Tahiti unspoiled by European civilization, was only a memory, but by ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... day Sir Piers de Currie crossed over to Bute. He was a man of middle age, tall and strong. His gigantic limbs were hard and stout as the trunk of an oak sapling. He wielded the longest sword and the heaviest battle-axe in Bute and Arran, and he was the best bowman in all the lands of the Clyde. His life among the mountains of Arran had given him ...
— The Thirsty Sword • Robert Leighton
... a small man of middle age who wore tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles, flitted covetously about the room, inspecting its treasures with a glistening eye. In a corner, Parker, a grave, lean individual, bent over the chafing-dish, in which he was preparing for his employer and ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... two desires, the one to be a great and beloved divine, the other to be a country gentleman, living in refinement, and in surroundings sympathetic to his emotional artistic temperament. The early promise of his youth, unfulfilled in his middle age, had disappointed him. But there was always one consolation. His son would endure no privation and limitation such as hampered a man without private means, like himself. As the heir to Herresford's great wealth, Dick's future ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... Venetian map, known as the Camaldolese Chart of Fra Mauro, executed in the convent of Murano just outside Venice, is not only the crowning specimen of mediaeval draughtsmanship, but the scientific review of the Prince's exploration. As Henry himself closes the middle age of exploration and begins the modern, so this map, the picture and proof of his discoveries, is not only the last of the older type of plan, but the first of the new style—the style which applied the accurate and careful methods of Portolano-drawing to ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... deposited on the sidewalk a large, common-looking travelling trunk. The driver, with the assistance of a boy hanging about the depot, carried the trunk into the baggage-room, and at this instant a woman of middle age, and poorly attired, entered the room, presented a ticket to Chicago, which she had just purchased, and asked to have the trunk checked to that place. The check was given her, and she took her departure. The baggage-master, half ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... criticism from some who generally share his political beliefs; and in a Tory paper I noticed the singularly inept gibe that this doctrine was "medieval." For my own part I should scarcely have thought that an undue tendency to love one's enemies was a characteristic trait of the Middle Age, or that Englishmen and Frenchmen, Guelphs and Ghibellines, were inclined to sink their racial differences in the unity of Christian citizenship. Lord Hugh's doctrine might be called by some modern and by others primitive; but medieval it can only be called on the principle that, in invective, ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... plenty of it, sidewalks and porches for easy airing, medical science and the art of nursing made more widely available even for the poor, more physical comforts of every sort, more widely distributed, all tend toward the preservation of life after middle age is reached. They also tend to keep alive many babies who would have died in harder conditions and prolong the life of many invalids who would have succumbed to hardships in early youth. Indeed, Doctor Holmes declared ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... a semi-civilized black of about the middle age, powerfully made, and decidedly unprepossessing in his appearance. He had been at one time a trooper in the native police force of the colony; in which corps he had been discreet enough to acquire all the vices and depravities of the whites, while their virtues remained to him that arcana ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... related to my husband a curious instance illustrative of this eager desire for riches. A man that she knew, who was a small manufacturer, had engaged in many local speculations which had always turned out well, and thereby rendered him a person of some wealth. He was rather past middle age, when he bethought him of insuring his life; and he had only just taken out his policy, when he fell ill of an acute disease which was certain to end fatally in a very few days. The doctor, half-hesitatingly, revealed to him his hopeless state. "By jingo!" cried he, rousing up at ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... somebody else, for Anne's feet were as nearly dancing round Emily as public propriety allowed, and the radiance of her face was something to rejoice in. Say what people will, Englishwomen in a quiet cheerful life are apt to gain rather than lose in looks up to the borders of middle age. Our Emily at two-and-thirty was fair and pleasant to look on; while as for Anne Fordyce at twenty-three, words will hardly tell how lovely were her delicate features, brown eyes, and carnation ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... shepherd and shepherdess are dancing; and then, outside the oval, in the four corners, the Muses Melpomene, Erato, Urania, and Clio, with their names. All this was passable; it was the portrait within the oval that gave the shock. The face is that of a grim, gaunt, stolid gentleman of middle age, looking like anybody or nobody, with long hair parted in the middle and falling down on both sides to the lace collar round the neck; one shoulder is cloaked, and the other shown tight in the buttoned tunic or coat; and the arms meet clumsily across the breast, the left arm uppermost. Round ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... when he took up Darwin's "Origin of Species" he did little more than open the book; so wearisome and uninteresting, he told me, did he find the reading of it. On the other hand, he is full of the ancient philosophers, and as he did not read them very extensively in his youth and middle age, he has returned to them finally with love and predilection for "these good old books." Unlike many thinkers of the day, he is persuaded that we cannot with impunity dispense with classic studies; and he rightly considers that science and ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... life would have lost its charm for Horace, had he put himself within the trammels of official service. At no time would these have been tolerable to him; but as he advanced into middle age, the freedom of entire independence, the refreshing solitudes of the country, leisure for study and reflection, became more and more precious to him. The excitements and gaieties and social enjoyments of ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... was a half-breed woman nearing middle age, clad in a decent black print dress, and a black straw hat, under the brim of which depended a circlet of attenuated, grizzled curls. Her face, like that of all the natives in the presence of whites, expressed a blank, in her case a mysterious blank. She was silent and ubiquitous; ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... Joyous greetings and merry repartee made the scene pleasant to witness even by one who, like Van Berg, had no part in it. Stanton, who at this moment joined him, drew his special attention to a thin and under-sized gentleman somewhat past middle age, who mounted the steps with a tread that was as inelastic as his face was devoid ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... whether it will be good or no. The second glass has the full savour of the grape; it is youth with vine-leaves in its hair and the passion of young blood. The third glass is void of emotion; it is grave and calm, like middle age; drink it slowly, you are in full possession of yourself, and it will not come again. The fourth glass has the sadness of death and ...
— Orientations • William Somerset Maugham
... name, variously written—Hiawatha, Hayenwatha, Ayonhwahtha, Taoungwatha—is rendered, "he who seeks the wampum belt." He had made himself greatly esteemed by his wisdom and his benevolence. He was now past middle age. Though many of his friends and relatives had perished by the machinations of Atotarho, he himself had been spared. The qualities which gained him general respect had, perhaps, not been without influence even on that redoubtable chief. Hiawatha had long beheld with grief ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... from sweet dishes, pastry, etc., and eat largely of the green-leaf vegetables and fruits with the articles of a simple diet which build but do not fatten the body. (See Diet and Corpulence; Diet for Middle Age, and ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... to the fire, and we talked for many hours. He told me that he had known Petrie and Sir William Wilde, and many living antiquarians, and had taught Irish to Dr. Finck and Dr. Pedersen, and given stories to Mr. Curtin of America. A little after middle age he had fallen over a cliff, and since then he had had little eyesight, and a trembling ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge |
