"Boyhood" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was January 31, 1735, the place was Caen, and his full name (his great- grandson and biographer vouches for it) was Michel-Guillaume-Jean de Crevecoeur. The boy was well enough brought up, but without more than the attention that his birth gave him the right to expect; he divided the years of his boyhood between Caen, where his father's town-house stood, and the College du Mont, where the Jesuits gave him his education. A letter dated 1785 and addressed to his children tells us all that we know of his school-days; though it is said, too, that he distinguished himself in mathematics. "If ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... article, we are about to prescribe for you any political draught. No! be assured that we know as little about politics as pyrotechny—that we are as blissfully ignorant of all that relates to the science of government as that of gastronomy—and have ever since our boyhood preferred the solid consistency of gingerbread to the crisp insipidity of parliament. The candidates of whom we write were no would-be senators—no sprouting Ciceros or embryo Demosthenes'—they were no aspirants for the grand honour of representing the honest and independent ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 6, 1841, • Various
... to find how vague the memories of his first thirty years had become. He remembered fragments, for the most part trivial moments, things of no great importance that he had observed. His boyhood seemed the most accessible at first, he recalled school books and certain lessons in mensuration. Then he revived the more salient features of his life, memories of the wife long since dead, her magic influence now gone ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... a cigarette. He was of those young men whose delicate mouths seem to have been fashioned for the nice conduct of a cigarette. And he had a way of blowing out the smoke that secretly ravished every feminine beholder. Horace still held to his boyhood's principles; but he envied Sidney ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... through Kenilworth Castle with Shakespeare, Walter Scott, Mary Ann Evans and a youth I used to know in boyhood by the name of Bill Hursey. We chased each other across the drawbridge, through the portcullis, down the slippery stones into the donjon-keep, around the moat, and up the stone steps to the topmost turret of the towers. Finally Shakespeare was "it," ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... perfume. It had thundered during the day, and it promised more thunder for the morrow. A murky, stifling night for a man of seventy-two! Whether it was the weather or the wakefulness, or some little touch of fever in his old limbs, Will's mind was besieged by tumultuous and crying memories. His boyhood, the night with the fat young man, the death of his adopted parents, the summer days with Marjory, and many of those small circumstances, which seem nothing to another, and are yet the very gist of a man's own life to himself—things seen, words heard, ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he walked, and his physical strength and courage were heroic. His mode of speaking was 'very impressive,' his utterance 'deliberate and strong.' His conversation was compared to 'an antique statue, where every vein and muscle is distinct and bold.' From boyhood throughout his life his companions naturally deferred to him, and he dominated them without effort. But what overcame the harshness of this autocracy, and made it reasonable, was the largeness of a nature that loved men and was ever hungry for knowledge of them. ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... was Superintendent of the Green Mountain Turnpike Company, extending from Bellows Falls to Rutland, Vt., from 1812 to 1832, and worked every rod of that road many times over. From our earliest boyhood we accompanied him on these working trips, attended by a large force of laboring men, and our attention was early called to the characteristics of these toad-producing rocks. The rotting slates, shales, sandstones, ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... that is in the habit of doing the right thing from boyhood, has only good motives, so it is very important for you that you concentrate assiduously on the habits that reinforce good motives. Surround yourself with every aid you can. Don't play with fire by forming bad habits. ...
— The Power of Concentration • Theron Q. Dumont
... took on its boyhood meaning. He shifted the youngster to his arms and crossing the room held out his hand ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... imagine that this may be the bone of a bonasus or a urus. He says, "It is probable many animals of this kind formerly lived in our England, being of old an island full of woods and forests, because even in our boyhood the horns of these animals were in common use at the table." The story of Sir Guy is furthermore quite romantic, and contains some circumstances very instructive to all ladies. For the chronicler asserts, "that Dame Felye, ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... boyhood that we never outgrow our love for. Some of the most enthusiastic fishermen are gray-haired men. We often hear about the boy with the bent pin and the piece of thread who catches more fish than the expert fisherman with modern, up-to-date tackle, but I doubt if it is so. As a ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller
... the days of boyhood came, And I had grown in love with fame, Duly I sought thy banks, and tried My first rude numbers by thy side. Words cannot tell how bright and gay The scenes of life before me lay. Then glorious hopes, that now to speak Would bring the blood into my cheek, Passed o'er ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... is mainly concerned with Russian history. While King Alfred was yet unborn, Norse settlements had been permanently founded in the outlying points, coasts, and islands of Scotland and Ireland, and in the years of his boyhood, about 860, Nadodd the Faeeroe Jarl sighted Iceland, which had been touched at by the Irish monks in 795 but was now to be first added as a lasting gain to Europe, as a new country, "Snowland"—something more than a hermitage for religious exiles from the world. ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... great unknown. Even the geographies of my boyhood showed nothing beyond. We were taught of nothing beyond. Speculation was discouraged. For two hundred years the Eastern Hemisphere had been wiped from the maps and histories of Pan-America. Its mention in fiction, ...
— The Lost Continent • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... exclaimed, "—that's just the taste exactly, though I haven't experienced it since boyhood; but how can water from a flowing stream, taste thus, and what the dickens makes it so warm? It must be at least 70 or ...
— The Land That Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... are shallow, poles are used, which the men handled very dexterously, nicking in and out amongst the rocks and rapids in the neatest way; but in the main the propulsion was by our paddles, a delight to me, having been bred to canoeing from boyhood. We stopped for luncheon at a lovely "place of trees" overhanging a deep, dark, alluring pool, where we knew there were fish, but had no time to make a cast. So far the banks of the Pelican were of a moderate height, and the adjacent country ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... Oedipus. Suddenly he checks the impulse, sensible of the presence of the chorus. He passes on to reason with himself, through a process of thought which Shakspeare could not have surpassed. He conjures up the image of that brother, hateful and unjust from infancy to boyhood, from boyhood up to youth— he assures himself that justice would be forsworn if this foe should triumph—and rushes on ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... parks or exploring new canyons, then the money which means action is usually forthcoming. Jim is still able to lose himself in those big Western dreams. Though he is over forty now, he meets new people and new enterprises with the impulsiveness by which his boyhood friends remember him. He never seems to me to grow older. His fresh color and sandy hair and quick-changing blue eyes are those of a young man, and his sympathetic, solicitous interest in women is as youthful as it ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather
... Dick almost sadly as he saw in memory's mirror the days of his boyhood; "but this is a world of change, man; we must ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... forty. How could those men who today are herding cattle, ploughing land, making pots, or drinking and idling on their lands, learn the art of warfare? Egyptians are poor materials for an army. I know that, for I see them daily. A Libyan, a Greek, a Hittite, in boyhood even uses a bow and arrows and a sling; he handles a club perfectly; in a year he learns to march passably. But only in three years will an Egyptian march in some fashion. It is true that he grows accustomed to a sword and a spear in two years, but to cast missiles four years are ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... I should like to mind my parents. Good children always do,' began Mr. Fairbairn, entirely forgetting the pranks of his boyhood, as ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... Day that Brad was out Moting and he dropped in at the College where his Boyhood Friend was now the Professor of Dipsicology ...
— People You Know • George Ade
... have had one object before me from my boyhood, and since you told me that I was to be your husband, that object has grown from a vague intention to a fixed purpose. Alice, I want to buy back the acres of my forefathers; I wish, I intend, that another Buckley shall be ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... her the truth about his boyhood, his ambition to be an artist, his renunciation to his father's hope, his career as a clergyman, his failure in religion, and the disgrace that had made ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... were able to corroborate what he said. Eban Cowan, however, had hitherto been ignorant of the fact, and had always supposed that Michael was Nelly's brother. This had originally made him anxious to gain Michael's friendship for her sake. Almost from his boyhood he had admired her, and his admiration increased with his growth, till he entertained for her as much affection as it was in ...
— Michael Penguyne - Fisher Life on the Cornish Coast • William H. G. Kingston
... old chivalries and piracies, and talks to the boyhood of to-day of shipwrecks and highwaymen, as if these venerable objects of worship had not been superseded long ago by mercantile heroes and dollar-coining newsboys." ...
— Sara Crewe - or, What Happened at Miss Minchin's • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... continuation of a branch of that of England, who is the political hero in the nation from which we sprang who represents a great principle or idea that we love to cherish? Hampden might answer if only we knew more about him. It occurs to me that Gray, in his poem which is read and conned from boyhood to old age, has done more than any one else to spread abroad the fame of Hampden. Included in the same stanza with Milton and with Cromwell, he seems to the mere reader of the poem to occupy the same place in history. In truth, however, as Mr. ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... some dispute in the matter, but I will believe, as I have said, that this dead Princess, for whose soul he prays, was certainly the wife of his boyhood, a child whom Richard II had wed just before that Lancastrian usurpation which is the irreparable disaster of English history. She was, I say, a child—a widow in name—when Charles of Orleans, himself in that small royal clique which was isolated and shrivelling, married ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... to that town Jeff had a confidante, into whose sympathetic bosom he had poured his joys and sorrows from the days of little boyhood. Of course this confidante was a woman—a thin, little, elderly creature, with bright blue eyes, and grey hair that had once been golden, who had a sort of tremble in her voice, and whose frame was so light that the fishermen were wont to say of her that if she was to show her ...
— Jeff Benson, or the Young Coastguardsman • R.M. Ballantyne
... thy studs, and upon thy cambric worked by the hands of beauty, to adorn the breast of valour! Know then, friend of my boyhood's days, that Arthur Pendennis of the Upper Temple, student-at-law, feels that he is growing lonely and old Care is furrowing his temples, and Baldness is busy with his crown. Shall we stop and have a drop of coffee at this stall, it looks ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... garrison or other cause renders it advisable, was what he practised, and would have wished his friend also to adopt. He was unable to comprehend Herrera's deeply-rooted and unselfish love, which had grown up with him from boyhood, had borne up against so many crosses and discouragements, and which time, although it might prove its hopelessness, could ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... Cincinnati schools, by the way, brings to the writer's mind very pleasant recollections of his boyhood's home, and of the times when he attended school there. Twenty-five years ago, the colored school-children of Cincinnati were much remarked for excellent singing. They were not then, as they are now, taught to read music in the schools, but readily ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... city of Teheran, where for many generations my ancestors were profound students of astrology, some of them famous men because of their skilful divinations, with reputations that reached even to Stamboul. For thither in my early boyhood to the court of the Sultan of the Osmanlis was my father summoned, and him I never beheld again. It was from my aged grandfather that I learned my first lessons in astrology—about the twelve houses, the ruling star of each day, the coming and the ...
— Tales of Destiny • Edmund Mitchell
... thou'lt pass in palace, or die rackt; But then, shone on the guns, a sublime soul.— A Bayard-boy's, bound by his pure parole! Honor redeemed though paid by parlous price, Though lost be sunlit sports, wild boyhood's spice, The Gates, the cheers of mates ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... vault was thickly studded. Up and down the sides of the ravine flickered millions of fireflies. Their restless glimmer wearied the eyes. Landless raised his to the one star, large, calm and beautiful, and prayed, then thought of all that star shone upon that night—most of the white town of his boyhood, lying fair and still like a dream town, above a measureless, slumberous sea. A great calm was upon him. Toil and danger were past; passionate hope and settled despair were past. That he would do what he had come this journey to do, he now had no doubt,—would not have doubted ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... hang about the house. Felipe, his heart sinking, pounded at the door, and at last aroused the aged superintendent, who was also a sort of major-domo in the household, and who in Felipe's boyhood had often ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... him all the way, as I have." Miss Maggie's voice shook with suppressed feeling. "Jim was always the dreamer. He fairly lived in his books. They were food and drink to him. He planned for college, of course. From boyhood he was going to write—great plays, great poems, great novels. He was always scribbling—something. I think he even tried to sell his things, in his 'teens; but of course nothing came ...
— Oh, Money! Money! • Eleanor Hodgman Porter
... possess, because they are aware of their own peccability, and therefore cannot look up to the clerical class for the proof of the possibility of a pure life on earth, with such reverential confidence as we are prone to do. But I remembered the innocent faith of my boyhood, and the good old silver-headed clergyman, who seemed to me as much a saint then on earth as he is now in heaven, and partly for whose sake, through all these darkening years, I retain a devout, though not intact nor unwavering respect for the entire fraternity. What a hideous ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... recall an incident of my boyhood, and am not sure that it was not this that first gave me ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... the wrong idea of things, altogether, Weyburn," he criticised, after I had tried to tell him that I was being made to hold the bag for some one else; and his use of the bare surname, when he had known me from boyhood, cut me like a knife. "You can't expect me to do anything for you unless you are entirely frank with me. As your counsel, I've got to know the facts; and you gain absolutely nothing by insisting to me that you ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... cross-eyes make convenient excuses for mutual torture, it happened that he had attained to the leadership of his gang. For some reason he took pride in his two Methodist names, and made short work of those who ventured to take liberties with them. In all other respects he played without reserve boyhood's immemorial game of give and take; but as to his name or any part thereof he would tolerate no foolishness and no back talk. When he reached the high school period, however, most of his intimates rarely called him by his full ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt
... mother who can feel she has done her duty, in this direction, while her boy is still a child. For those mothers, though, whose little boys have now grown to boyhood with the evil still upon them, and you, through ignorance, permitted it, we would say, 'Begin at once; it is never too late.' If he has not lost all will power, he can be saved. Let him go in confidence to a reputable physician and follow ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... made happy at once with a kind welcome; while Pierre, the center of a wondering and exclaiming circle, narrated the wild adventures of the past few days, which had, indeed developed him all at once from boyhood to manhood. As he described the massacre, and the manner in which he had rescued the yellow-haired lassie, his mother drew the little one into her arms and cried over her from sympathy and excitement; and the child wiped ...
— The Raid From Beausejour; And How The Carter Boys Lifted The Mortgage • Charles G. D. Roberts
... ribbon-wise behind the cliffs, where his phaeton was waiting for him; for Jacques de Wissant had as yet resisted the wish of his wife and the advice of those of his friends who considered that he ought to purchase an automobile: driving had been from boyhood one of ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... gentle meekness and firm resolve, abounding with tenderness and hot with courage. Richard Rich—who beyond Scroggs or Jeffreys deserves to be remembered as the arch-scoundrel of the legal profession—was one of Thomas More's playmates and boon companions for several years of their boyhood and youth. Richard's father was an opulent mercer, and one of Sir John's near neighbors; so the youngsters were intimate until Master Dick, exhibiting at an early age his vicious propensities, came to be "esteemed very light of his tongue, a great dicer and gamester, and not ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... the moment they first enter the school-house until they are snatched from the scene of their over-wrought strugglings. At the school, the child is treated as a man. The fresh air, the blue sky, the bright and happy hilarity of boyhood are too often proscribed indulgences. And this is called, not murder, but education. Those who survive it, having been taught that an American youth should never be satisfied with the present, that excelsior should be the only motto, and that all pleasure should be ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... welcomed him with open arms; it had ushered him into a new and wondrous world. His hands had fallen to men's tasks, experience had come to him by leaps and bounds. In a rush he had emerged from groping boyhood into full maturity; physically, mentally, morally, he had grown strong and broad and brown. Having abandoned himself to the tides of circumstance, he had been swept into a new existence where Adventure had rubbed shoulders with him, where Love had smiled into his eyes. ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... intelligence Is stamped on every line, Banqueting our craving sense With minist'rings divine. If thy Boyhood be so great, What will be the coming Man, Could we overleap the span? Are there treasures in the mine, To pay ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... the senna have vanished, we fear, As the poet has said, like the snows of last year; And where is the mixture in boyhood we quaff'd, That was known by the ominous name of Black Draught? While Gregory's Powder has gone, we are told, To the limbo of drugs that are ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, October 4, 1890 • Various
... became a rich and, in a way, a free man, for now he could, without the silent protest of his wife, recover the neglected lore of wood and field, and practise forgotten arts that had in his boyhood come under the elastic head of chores. Elizabeth, his daughter, had never shared her mother's ambitions. Perhaps because she had always had it she cared nothing for society. She was well content to ride ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... a day in Vilkina-land, where dwelt one Eigill, a famous archer, who, it is said, was a brother of Veliant, Siegfried's fellow-apprentice in the days of his boyhood. And men told them this story of Eigill. That once on a time old Nidung, the king of that land, in order to test his skill with the bow, bade him shoot an apple, or, as some say, an acorn, from the head of his own little son. And Eigill ...
— The Story of Siegfried • James Baldwin
... the victor of Yorktown, threading the trails of the Potomac, passing on by Cumberland and Fort Necessity and Braddock's grave to the Monongahela. The man, now at the height of his fame, is retracing the trails of his boyhood—covering ground over which he had passed as a young officer in the last English and French war—but he is seeing the land in so much larger perspective that, although his diary is voluminous, the reader of those pages would not know that Washington had ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... up to it and pushed the door farther open. An odour came forth—a damp, rancid, familiar, musty, intoxicating, beloved odour stirring strongly at old memories of happy days and travels. Black Eagle sniffed at the witching smell as the returned wanderer smells of the rose that twines his boyhood's cottage home. Nostalgia seized him. He put his hand inside. Excelsior—dry, springy, curly, soft, enticing, covered the floor. Outside the drizzle had turned to ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... unknown records of Henry Fielding's boyhood are to be found in the proceedings of a Chancery suit begun by Lady Gould, on behalf of her six grandchildren, Henry, Edmund, [6] Katherine, Ursula, Sarah and Beatrice, three years after the death of their mother—namely, on the 10th ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... of my boyhood and early life, the people of Ireland were, generally speaking, an honest, candid, faithful, and grateful people, who loved truth, and felt the practical influence of religious feeling strongly, but so dishonest and degrading has been the long curse of agitation, to which forms ...
— The Tithe-Proctor - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... work of no light resolve, and we need not be surprised at finding the resolve and the purpose at the outset of the poet's life. We may freely accept the key supplied by the words of the Vita Nuova. The spell of boyhood is never broken, through the ups and downs of life. His course of thought advances, alters, deepens, but is continuous. From youth to age, from the first glimpse to the perfect work, the same idea abides with him, "even from the flower till the grape was ripe." It may assume ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... undertaken with avidity; they are more abundant indeed than for any other contemporary French man of letters even in these days of unhesitating self-revelation; and they are also of an absolutely impregnable authenticity. M. Ernest Daudet has written a whole volume to tell us all about his brother's boyhood and youth and early manhood and first steps in literature. M. Leon Daudet has written another solid tome to tell us all about his father's literary principles and family life and later years and death. Daudet himself put forth a pair of pleasant books of personal ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... Dave's hands. Coal had ceased to be a smutty mineral, and had taken on talismanic qualities unguessed by the mere animal workman; and sugar, and coffee, and beans, and rice, and spices, each would open its own wonderful world before this young and fertile mind. As an heritage from his boyhood on the ranges Dave had astonishingly alert senses; his sight, his hearing, his sense of smell and of touch were vastly more acute than those of the average university graduate. . . And if that were true might it not fairly be said ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... that I presumptuously Have spoken? that from hastening disgrace 'Twere better far to hide my foolish face? That whining boyhood should with reverence bow Ere the dread thunderbolt could reach? How! If I do hide myself, it sure shall be In the very fane, the light of Poesy: If I do fall, at least I will be laid Beneath the silence of a poplar ...
— Poems 1817 • John Keats
... facts and experiences, welded to acutely wrought up sympathies, and these he could not elsewhere have obtained, in a manner so peculiarly adapted to his nature. His physical being was well trained, also, running wild until advanced into boyhood; hard work and light diet, thereafter, and a skill in ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... of her, averred that the best it could do for him would be to show what kind of stuff he was made of. His uncle R.C. was stoutly in favor of taking him. I believe the balance fell in Romer's favor when I remembered my own boyhood. As a youngster of three I had babbled of "bars an' buffers," and woven fantastic and marvelous tales of fiction about my imagined adventures—a habit, alas! I have never ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... sons of Usna rejoice, for now might they sail south to the land upon which their father's castle had stood in their boyhood. ...
— Celtic Tales - Told to the Children • Louey Chisholm
... preparation for the reception of Catherine of Braganza, the bride of Charles II., who spent the royal honeymoon in this historic building, which had in its time sheltered for their brief spans of favour the six wives of Henry VIII. and the sickly boyhood of Edward VI.:— ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... man, with his comic voice and funnily-painted face. Listening to the tunes prescribed by the Book of Ceremonies, and dining in solemn solitary grandeur off the eight[*] precious kinds of food set apart for the sovereign, his late Majesty passed his boyhood, until in 1872 he married the fair A-lu-te, and practically ascended the dragon throne of his ancestors. Up to that time the Empresses-Dowager, hidden behind a bamboo screen, had transacted business with the members of the Privy Council, signing all documents of State ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... boyhood, Torthorwald had one of the grand old typical Parish Schools of Scotland; where the rich and the poor met together in perfect equality; where Bible and Catechism were taught as zealously as grammar ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... Elvino has married a poor orphan, Amina. The ceremony has taken place at the magistrate's, and Elvino is about to obtain the sanction of the church to his union, when the owner of the castle, Count Rudolph, who fled from home in his boyhood, returns most unexpectedly and, at once making love to Amina, excites the bridegroom's jealousy. Lisa, the young owner of a little inn, who wants Elvino for herself and disdains the devotion of Alexis, a simple peasant, tries to avenge herself on her happy rival. Lisa ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... group of our illustration has long borne the title of Jean Grusset Richardot and his Son. This Richardot was a celebrated Flemish diplomat of the sixteenth century, and president of the Privy Council of the Low Countries. As he died in Van Dyck's boyhood, his portrait could not have been made by our painter directly from life. Nor can we believe with some that years after the diplomat's death Van Dyck copied from some old picture the likeness seen here. A portrait painted in this way would ...
— Van Dyck - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... been adapted and enlarged in the light of recent research, and all possible sources have been drawn upon to make a complete and rounded story of Napoleon's boyhood upon the basis furnished by Madame Foa's sketch. If this glimpse of the boy Napoleon shall lead young readers to the study of the later career of this marvellous man, unbiased by partisanship, and swayed neither by ...
— The Boy Life of Napoleon - Afterwards Emperor Of The French • Eugenie Foa
... belief or, rather, haunting dread, that he was predestined to evil is to be traced to the Calvinistic teaching of his boyhood (compare Childe Harold, Canto III. stanza lxx. lines 8, 9; and Canto IV. stanza xxxiv. line 6). Lady Byron regarded this creed of despair as the secret of her husband's character, and the source of his aberrations. In a letter to H. C. Robinson, March 5, 1855, she writes, "Not merely from casual ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... Mr. Barnum goes back to the period of my small-boyhood, when he came to the country village near my home to lecture upon temperance. I still remember the animation of his discourse on that occasion; its humor and its anecdote; and, with what absorbing interest the large audience sat out the hour and a half or ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... 1/2 an hour to read. Lord M. read it beautifully with that fine soft voice of his, and with so much expression, so that it is needless to say I was much interested by it." And then the talk would take a more personal turn. Lord M. would describe his boyhood, and she would learn that "he wore his hair long, as all boys then did, till he was 17; (how handsome he must have looked!)." Or she would find out about his queer tastes and habits—how he never carried a watch, ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... a boy! He had never had any boyhood, any childhood—he had been a state personage ever since he had known that he was anything. I found myself thinking suddenly of the thin-lipped old family lawyer, who had had much to do with shaping his character, and whom Sylvia ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... he reproved Landoire, who, however, had done nothing more than execute the order he had received. How could he imagine I would submit to such treatment, considering that we had been friends since our boyhood, and that I was now living on full terms of confidence and familiarity ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... solitary journey, and praying as a highest favour that he might be left alone. Cambridge had not answered his prayer. She had taken and soothed him, and warmed him, and had laughed at him a little, saying that he must not be so tragic yet awhile, for his boyhood had been but a dusty corridor that led to the spacious halls of youth. In one year he had made many friends and learnt much, and he might learn even more if he could but concentrate his attention ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... church, so full of friendly memories. In this one building alone there are twenty things known to me from a boy. For from boyhood I have held in my memory those lines by Queen Elizabeth which she uttered here, and have read Lilly and Ashmole and Maginn; and this is only one corner in merrie England! Am I a stranger here? There is a father-land of the soul, which has no ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... of a dream, and he was alone with the moon, the hazy mystery of the level, grassy plain, and the monotony of the unending road. As he rode slowly along he thought of that other dreary plain, white with alkali patches and brown with rings of deserted camp-fires, known to his boyhood of deprivation, dependency, danger, and adventure, oddly enough, with a strange delight; and his later years of study, monastic seclusion, and final ease and independence, with an easy sense of wasted existence and useless waiting. ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... gentleman, with a frigid gray eye, who said little to anybody, but of whom everybody said that he had a very handsome fortune. He was not a sentimental father, and the roughness I just now spoke of in Rowland's life dated from his early boyhood. Mr. Mallet, whenever he looked at his son, felt extreme compunction at having made a fortune. He remembered that the fruit had not dropped ripe from the tree into his own mouth, and determined it should be no fault of ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... the old man. "I remember! Six hills in a row. Busters!"—looking wonderfully knowing, and, with feeble forefinger raised, nodding and winking at his great-grandchild,—as it were across the slim gulf of a hundred years which divided the gleeful boyhood of Joe from the second childhood of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... It could be no otherwise with one who loved and comprehended childhood and whom the children loved. And what does Hamlet say?—"He hath borne me upon his back a thousand times . . . Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft!" Of what is he thinking but of his boyhood, before doubts and contemplation wrapped him in the shadow, and when in his young grief or frolic the gentle Yorick, with his jest, his "excellent fancy," and his songs and ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... did as he was told, Mr. Brook giving one hearty squeeze to the lad's hand as he was led away. The others, accustomed to the darkness from boyhood, proceeded at once to carry out Jack's instructions, wetting their flannel jackets and then beating the roof with them towards the entrance to the stall; for five minutes they continued ...
— Facing Death - The Hero of the Vaughan Pit. A Tale of the Coal Mines • G. A. Henty
... there were some in those devoted bands O'er whom the blissful scenes of other lands Came rushing wildly; and with piercing gaze They looked an instant on their boyhood's days; Remembered well the hours that flew too fast, Remembered some with whom those hours were past; And, 'mid the group of dear companions gay, Remembered well some whom they saw that day; But sprang not forward with familiar grasp And friendly air, ...
— Canadian Wild Flowers • Helen M. Johnson
... drives. There were picnics and expeditions in the summer weather, moonlight sails on the bay, starts before dawn or home-comings at midnight, and often, of nights, the many bedrooms were filled as they had never been before. Tom must cover all his boyhood ramblings, catch trout again on Bull Creek, shoot quail over Walcott's Prairie, get a deer on Round Mountain. That deer was a cause of pain and shame to Frederick. What if it was closed season? Tom had triumphantly brought home the buck and gleefully called ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... thing for him to do. He must meet her on her own basis of boyhood, and not make the mistake of treating her as a woman. He wondered if he could love the woman she would be when her nature awoke; and he wondered if he could love her just as she was and himself wake her up. After all, whatever it was, she had come to fill quite a large place in ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... of Quintus is his fellow soldier Aulus. They had spent their boyhood together among the scenes of Rome; now they are companions still, on this last Roman expedition to the district of Judaea. While the common soldiery are throwing their dice in the camp thoroughfare, these are speaking of more serious ...
— An Easter Disciple • Arthur Benton Sanford
... habits persist in the earlier stages; it is only in the mature form that the later acquired habits begin fully to predominate. Even so our own boys pass through an essentially savage childhood of ogres and fairies, bows and arrows, sugar-plums and barbaric nursery tales, as well as a romantic boyhood of mediaeval chivalry and adventure, before they steady down into that crowning glory of our race, the solid, sober, matter-of-fact, commercial British Philistine. Hence the coco-nut in its unstripped state is roughly triangular ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... thing of little might! Thou painted bogey! I am conscience-proof, And care no more what names I may be called. If thou cans't make this hour glide more swift, With idle chat of owls and haunted men, I'll take thee for a gossip. Sit you there And hide the hour-glass. There was a time In early boyhood, when a thing like thee Seemed horrible, but now my mouth is dry With other terror. Thou art a cap and bells: Play me a ditty on a tambourine. [Starting up.] Who goes there? [Rushes to Smith, who enters.] Tell ...
— The Treason and Death of Benedict Arnold - A Play for a Greek Theatre • John Jay Chapman
... convinced Whibley that the Count had discovered a secret gold mine in Peru. She said she knew all about it, and counselled Whibley to beg the Count to let him put a few thousands into the working of it. "Maria," it appeared, had known the Count from his boyhood, and could answer for it that he was the most honourable man in all South America. Possibly enough ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... Dion and he met next day he was not surprised at the change in Dion's appearance and manner. Nor were his young eyes merciless in their scrutiny. Just at first, perhaps, they stared with the unthinking observation of boyhood, but almost immediately Jimmy had taken the cue his mother had given him, and had entered into his part of a driver-away ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... which they have lost—the messages of baby-cherubs, made in God's own image! This to me, to whom every butterfly, every look at my little sister, contradicted the lie! You may say that such thoughts were too deep for a child; that I am ascribing to my boyhood the scepticism of my manhood; but it is not so; and what went on in my mind goes on in the minds of thousands. It is the cause of the contempt into which not merely sectarian Protestantism, but Christianity altogether, ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... prince of the wilderness. He had but very little work to do during the period of his boyhood. His principal occupation was the practice of a few simple arts in warfare and the chase. Aside from this, he was ...
— Indian Boyhood • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... David's) of course occurs when he binds a bear with his girdle. Sciold is full grown at fifteen, and Hadding is full grown in extreme youth. The hero in his boyhood slays a full-grown man and champion. The cinder-biting, lazy stage of a mighty youth ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... medieval Catholicism and in folk-lore is one of the most prominent traits in the Romantic movement, which reached its culmination during the boyhood of Heine. The history of Heine's connection with this movement is foreshadowed by the circumstances of his first contact with it. He tells us that the first book he ever read was Don Quixote (in the translation ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... dancers gave an unusually fine exhibition of their tribal dances for the visitors. The General expressed his appreciation quite warmly to Joe after the dance ended, and asked Joe to pose with him for a picture. He was recalling other boyhood reading he had done, and his interest in the Indians was quite naive. Joe took him into the Hopi House and they spent an hour or so going over the exhibition of Indian ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... the same trouble is at the bottom of both failures. The adventure writer, half unconsciously perhaps, has been too much occupied play-acting himself into half-forgotten boyhood heroics. The more modest man, with even more self-consciousness, has been thinking of how he is going to appear in the eyes of the expert. Both have thought of themselves before their work. This aspect of the matter would probably ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... we to ask President Coolidge to recall some of his boyhood experiences on the farm, he would tell us how he slid off the old, white mare and broke his arm so badly that the bone stuck out through the flesh, and how long it took to bring the doctor eleven miles over the rough road from Ludlow to set it. Or, he might tell us about the wall-eyed cow that ...
— Modern Americans - A Biographical School Reader for the Upper Grades • Chester Sanford
... blacksmith, who had become famous for her jewels and her social eccentricities. She and her party were established at one of the up-town "Trottoires," when Nobel Bergman and Lorelei arrived. Three examples of blushing boyhood devoted themselves to a languid blonde girl of thirty-five, and the hostess herself was dancing with another tender youth, but she ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... as pretty as Roselands," said her father. "Travilla and I have known each other from boyhood, and I spent many a happy day at Ion, and we had many a boyish frolic together, before I ever thought ...
— Elsie Dinsmore • Martha Finley
... once to point out that the accident need not necessarily end fatally. He invented tales of goods-trains that had passed over him early in life, and the surgical skill that had left him whole and sound. Trains were really unknown in his boyhood, but there was no one to contradict him. The public, stimulated to hopefulness, produced analogous experiences. It had had a hay-cart over it, with a harvest-home on the top, such as we see in pictures. It had had the Bangor coach over ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... child, a boy of serious earnest demeanor, was teaching his companions to play at arranging, according to the rites, toy sacrificial vessels on a toy altar. Beyond this, and that they were poor, and that he doted on his mother—who would have deserved it,—we know little of his boyhood. "At fifteen," he tells us himself, "his mind was bent on learning." Nothing in the way of studies, seems to have come amiss to him; of history, and ritual, and poetry, he came to know all that was to be known. He loved music, theory ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... contemporaries of the Reign of Terror, and had been tried in that unparalleled period as by a fiery furnace, while their opinions were in a formative state. Crabbe and Rogers were traditions of the time of Goldsmith and Johnson; Gilford wrote with a virulence and ability which he might have learned in boyhood from Junius; but with these exceptions, English literature fifty years ago ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... blaze of sunshine streaming up in the heavens; the dewy woods, flecked here and there by the blossoms of some wild fruit or flower; the cool air beneath the gigantic arms all a-flutter with the warbling music of birds; all conjoin to inspire a feeling which carries us back to boyhood again—to make ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... vine covered porch that morning, the old man's thoughts went back to that day when the boy first came to him on the river bank, and to all the bright days of Dan's boyhood and youth that he had passed with the lad in the hills. "His life—" said he, talking to himself, as he has a way of doing—"His life is like this day, fresh and clean and—". He looked across the street to the monument that stood a ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... morals but no trace of the reforms begun by Josiah soon after 621 B.C. Some therefore hold that he had settled in the City before that year.(263) Anathoth, however, lay so near Jerusalem that even from his boyhood Jeremiah must have been familiar with the life and trade of the capital; and as his name is not mentioned in connection with the discovery of the Law-Book on which the reforms were based, and neither he nor ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... had no sooner seen you than 'twas you alone that he desired, that he demanded, that he sought with ardour? Will they tear, will they lacerate me with their censures, if I, whose body Heaven fashioned all apt for love, whose soul from very boyhood was dedicate to you, am not insensible to the power of the light of your eyes, to the sweetness of your honeyed words, to the flame that is kindled by your gentle sighs, but am fond of you and sedulous to pleasure you; you, again I bid them remember, in whom a hermit, a rude, ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... her, a little chagrined at her apparent slowness in appreciating his noble condescension. In his boyhood he had entertained a passion for his cousin, Anne Chute; but after the long separation of school and college, he had imagined that his early love was completely forgotten. The feeling with which he regarded her now was rather of resentment than ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... chat away in unconstrained fashion, chat she did, with such an accompaniment of sparkling eyes, waving hands, and sunny smiles, as was a positive tonic to behold. She told stories of her own adventures or misadventures, which Mr Vanburgh capped by remembrances of his own boyhood; they compared notes as to their mutual sensations at critical moments, and so sympathetic did they appear, that the girl was forced ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... his arms about this girl, who, from his early boyhood, had been his ideal of womanhood, of love, and of all that love meant, forgot those things which had shaken his life and brought him to the threshold of death, forgot those evidences of illness which marred the once glorious beauty of the girl, forgot the black ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... the preliminary to the speech which sent Wesley forth for doughnuts, then to his study, ostensibly to finish his lovely sermon, but in reality to think thoughts which made his young forehead, of almost boyhood, frown, and his pleasant mouth droop, then inexplicably smooth and smile. It was a day which no man in the flush of youth could resist. That June day fairly rioted in through the open windows. Mrs. Black's muslin curtains danced in the June breeze ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... who arrives shortly after Robin-Redbreast, with whom he associates both at this season and in the autumn, is the Golden-Winged Woodpecker, alias, "High-Hole," alias, "Flicker," alias, "Yarup." He is an old favorite of my boyhood, and his note to me means very much. He announces his arrival by a long, loud call, repeated from the dry branch of some tree, or a stake in the fence,—a thoroughly melodious April sound. I think how Solomon finished ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... delivered a few years before Bill was born, but it held good in some cases, he was sure, in his early boyhood. There were then some cotton mills in Keighley district, and the young were allowed to submit to toil which was far too exhausting to allow of nature battling for the support of the human frame. Hence, Bill's own description ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... the gold they dug, it did not seem to him heroic. Nor was he mollified as he stood beside the rude refreshment bar—a few planks laid on trestles—and drank his coffee beneath the dripping canvas roof, with an odd recollection of his boyhood and an inclement Sunday-school picnic. Yet these men had been living in this shiftless fashion for three weeks! It exasperated him still more to think that he might have to wait there a few days longer for the water to subside sufficiently ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... she said irresolutely, and without intending to enter, found herself within the hall. There a narrow stairway lay before her; he pointed to it; with an excess of juvenile solicitude and politeness, boyhood's involuntary tribute to youth and beauty in need of assistance, he told her to go on, ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... airy as that of the flying fox when, fresh and unjaded, he leads away from the hounds, whose sudden cry has broken him off from hunting mice amid the bogs of the meadow. So this riderless horse came vaulting along. Now from my earliest boyhood I have had what horsemen call a 'weakness' for horses. Only give me a colt of wild, irregular temper and fierce blood to tame, and I am perfectly happy. Never did lash of mine, singing with cruel sound through the air, fall on such a colt's soft ...
— A Ride With A Mad Horse In A Freight-Car - 1898 • W. H. H. Murray
... me about it. I took refuge in the evasion: "One can't win all one's suits," but I thought to myself: "If for eight years I sat as Primus on the first bench, while he moved around somewhere in the middle of the class, may he not naturally have had a wish from his boyhood days that I, too, might for once ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... great need To be forgiven: sadly I have been slack In guardianship, and by so much betrayed My promise to our mother's passing soul. Myself in cares immersed, I left the child Among his toys—and turn to find him man— But yet so much a boy that boyhood can (Wistfully) Laugh in his honest eyes? Forgive me, Lucio! Tell me, whate'er have slackened, there has slipped No knot of love. To-morrow we'll make sport, Be playmates and invent new games, and old— Wreath ...
— The Vigil of Venus and Other Poems by "Q" • Q
... profoundly conscious of the moral obligation that devolved upon him, to render the declining years of his parents as free from discomfort and anxiety as it was within his power to do. They had nursed and trained him in infancy and boyhood; had set before him daily the example of an upright life, and had instilled in him a love of truth, honesty and every manly virtue. Their claim upon him, now that he had met with a measure of success in life, ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... separated from him; it was not that she could give him the instruction required from masters in childhood, but a tenderness, allowed to run to the utmost extreme, entirely blinded her. Bailly then formed his own mind, under the eye of his parents. Nothing could be better, it seemed, than the boyhood of our brother academician, to verify the oft-repeated theory, touching the influence of imitation on the development of our faculties. Here, the result, attentively examined, would not by a great deal agree with the old hypothesis. I know not but, every ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... had seemed to him that when he caught the girl of the cherries in his arms he should hold veritable happiness; and yet afterward there was only a great heaviness and something of the repulsion that he felt to-day. Happiness was not to be found on a woman's lips he had learned this in his boyhood; and then even as the knowledge returned to him he found himself savagely regretting that he had not kissed Maria Fletcher the day he found her on his land—a kiss of anger, not of love, which she would ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... very depressing. Jeffrey's talk, though inconclusive, had stirred in John's mind an uneasiness which was near to apprehension. He turned and walked about the familiar room, recognizing the well-known furniture, his mother's picture over the mantel, the bookshelves filled with his boyhood's accumulations, the well-remembered pattern of the carpet, and the wall-paper—nothing was changed. It was all as he had left it two years ago, and for the time it seemed as if he had merely dreamed the life and experiences of ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... result gained by experience of life is clearness of view. This is what distinguishes the man of mature age, and makes the world wear such a different aspect from that which it presented in his youth or boyhood. It is only then that he sees things quite plain, and takes them for that which they really are: while in earlier years he saw a phantom-world, put together out of the whims and crotchets of his own mind, inherited prejudice and strange delusion: the ...
— Counsels and Maxims - From The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... been a bone of contention at Blanford. His aunt had attempted to apply the same rigorous treatment to him that had been meted out to his father; but the lad, whose spirit had not been broken, refused to submit. At first, in his boyhood days, his feeling was chiefly one of awe of Miss Matilda, who always seemed to be interfering with his pleasure, and who made the Sabbath anything but a day of peace for the restless child. Then came long terms at school, ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells |
