"Childhood" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Byron Evanescence of literary fame Parentage of Scott Birth and childhood Schooling and reading Becomes an advocate His friends and pleasures Personal peculiarities Writing of poetry; first publication Marriage and settlement "Scottish Minstrelsy" "Lay of the Last Minstrel;" Ashestiel rented ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... because from childhood she has been taught that toadstools are poison. Some are, of course, boy, so are some wild fruits, but it would be rather a deprivation for us if we were to decline to eat every kind of fruit ...
— The Weathercock - Being the Adventures of a Boy with a Bias • George Manville Fenn
... you on living in the corner of all London that I like best. A PROPOS, you are very right about my voluntary aversion from the painful sides of life. My childhood was in reality a very mixed experience, full of fever, nightmare, insomnia, painful days and interminable nights; and I can speak with less authority of gardens than of that other 'land of counterpane.' ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... has the necessity arisen of recalling to American legislators the lessons of freedom taught in lisping childhood by loving mothers; that pervade the atmosphere we have breathed from infancy; that so form part of our very being, that in their absence we would lose the consciousness of our own identity? Heaven be praised that not all have forgotten ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... calm them, to a degree supported the spirits of her fellow-prisoners. Josephine herself ascribed her firmness to her implicit trust in the prediction of an old negress which she had treasured in her memory from childhood. Her trust, indeed, in the inexplicable mysteries of divination was sufficiently proved by the interest with which she is said to have frequently applied herself during her sad hours of imprisonment to learn her fortune from a pack of cards. Mr. Alison mentions, that he had heard of the prophecy ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... itself into folds with the body, yet it is rarely so forged as that the clasps and rivets do not gall us. All men feel this, though they do not think of it, nor reason out its consequences. They look back to the days of childhood as of greatest happiness, because those were the days of greatest wonder, greatest simplicity, and most vigorous imagination. And the whole difference between a man of genius and other men, it has been said a thousand times, and most truly, is that the first remains ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... raised to heaven her eyes, red with weeping. "Oh, the innocence of childhood, the happiness of childhood!" said she, softly, "why do they not go with us through life? why must we tread them under feet like the violets arid roses of my son? A kingdom falls to him as his portion, and yet he takes pleasure in the little dog which ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... confidences, have a morbid fear of giving them. Perhaps it is because I was so much alone, so self-centred, in my childhood. ...
— The Dangerous Age • Karin Michaelis
... hard apprenticeship in early childhood. Nature directs him to adopt this course of life, and endows him with a bold heart, a cool head, a sinewy frame, and an iron constitution. The incipient poachers soon leave the inhabited districts to live in the forests, with trees for their roof, ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... lady and a gentleman, both costumed in the fashion of twenty years ago. The gentleman was in the shade. I could not see him well. The lady had the benefit of a full beam from the softly shaded lamp. I presently recognised her; I had seen this picture before in childhood; it was my mother; that and the companion picture being the only heir-looms saved out of the ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... From early childhood, an ardent love of beauty had characterized this girl, whose covetous gaze wandered from a gorgeous scarlet and gold orchid nodding in dreams of its habitat, in some vanilla scented Brazilian jungle, to a bed of vivid green moss, where skilful hands had grouped great ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... pleasant and lively, Ned, But what to us is its charm? To-night all my thoughts are fixed, instead, On our childhood's old home farm. I know you are thinking the same, dear Ned, With your head bowed on your arm, For to-morrow at four we'll be jerked out of bed To plow on that darned ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... human purposes but conversation. His eyes were sealed by a cheap, school-book materialism. He could see nothing in the world but money and steam-engines. He did not know what you meant by the word happiness. He had forgotten the simple emotions of childhood, and perhaps never encountered the delights of youth. He believed in production, that useful figment of economy, as if it had been real like laughter; and production, without prejudice to liquor, was his god and guide. One day he took me to task—a novel cry to me—upon the over-payment of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... too, softly and monotonously, and the sorrow that had not come with years left his tired face, and he fearlessly drifted away into the Shadowy Valley where his lost childhood lay. ...
— Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch • Alice Caldwell Hegan
... this story out of bygone days, which you have just told me. Nothing has changed—nothing whatever. The thought of my mother is as sacred to me as ever. And the man in whose house I was born and raised, who surrounded my childhood and youth with care tenderness, and whom my mother—loved.... He means just as much to me now as he ever ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... of the habitually taciturn Carrick. The tattered rags of the fellow's humble past were spread before him in all their pathetic squalor. He saw, as though a living thing, the barren, inarticulate childhood. He heard, under compulsion, the tale of youth's indefinable longings, with the meagre story of a love which lacked not its own shabby tragedy. The delicacy of a gentleman, who had intruded where he had no right, had caused him to draw back with an apology; ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... a fable is nothing else than a false discourse shadowing forth the truth: for a fable is the image of truth. But the soul is the image of the natures prior to herself; and hence the soul very properly rejoices in fables, as an image in an image. As we are therefore from our childhood nourished in fables, it is necessary that they should be introduced. And thus much for the first problem, concerning ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... more highly developed breed from the mixture of an inferior blood. But Grom, the Chief and the wise man, had many vague impulses moving him at times which were novel to the human play-fellows of Earth's childhood. He disliked hurting a woman or a child. He might, quite conceivably, have refused to concern himself with the suppliant before him, and merely left her and her baby to the chances of the jungle. But the peculiar character of her wounds interested him. She aroused his curiosity. Here ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... of rupture occur in childhood. But there are many cases which occur between the ages of 30 and 40. And it is a well known fact that two-fifths of such cases become Scrotal because of neglect, or because a truss is worn that does not keep the rupture ...
— Cluthe's Advice to the Ruptured • Chas. Cluthe & Sons
... her lips naturally. To her it seemed true that she had indeed waited long and hoped and thought of him. And it was not all false. Ever since her childhood she had been told to wait, for her love would come and would come only once. And so it was true, and the dream grew sweeter and the illusion of the enchantment more enchanting still. For it was an enchantment ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... to the water's edge, slake their thirst in their dainty way, and flutter off. By the brookside path now and then wander prattling children; a youth and a maiden hand in hand wend their way along the cool stream's brink. The words of the children and the lovers are unknown to me, but the story of childhood and ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis
... members of the family. As a child, I suffered, though not very frequently, from nocturnal enuresis. My sexual nature, though normal, has been keenly alive and sensitive as far back as I can remember; and as I look back I discern within myself in early childhood what I now understand to be a decided masochistic or passively algolagnic tendency. So far as I remember, this manifested itself in me in two aspects; one psychic or sentimental and free from carnality, expressing itself in imaginative visions such as the following: I used, to imagine myself ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... English (and a little Scotch), and by no means an aristocrat, was junior partner in the great firm of Vougeot-Conti et Cie., wine merchants, Dijon. And at Dijon I had spent much of my childhood, and been to a day school there, and led a very happy ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... comes from California to New Jersey to live with a brother and sister whom she has not known since very early childhood. She is so democratic in her social ideas that many amusing scenes occur, and it is hard for her to understand many things that she must learn. But her good heart carries her through, and her conscientiousness and moral courage win affection ...
— Dorothy Dainty at Glenmore • Amy Brooks
... the same to them at 50 that it did at all former milestones in their journey. I wonder how they can lie so. It comes of practice, no doubt. They would not say that of Dickens's or Scott's books. Nothing remains the same. When a man goes back to look at the house of his childhood, it has always shrunk: there is no instance of such a house being as big as the picture in memory and imagination call for. Shrunk how? Why, to its correct dimensions: the house hasn't altered; this is the first time it ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... knowledge, from my immediate associates, than on this plantation. Even "MAS' DANIEL," by his association with his father's slaves, had measurably adopted their dialect and their ideas, so far as they had ideas to be adopted. The equality of nature is strongly asserted in childhood, and childhood requires children for associates. Color makes no difference with a child. Are you a child with wants, tastes and pursuits common to children, not put on, but natural? then, were you black as ebony you would be welcome to the child of alabaster whiteness. ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... plantation at the Cannes Brulees, where Aurore Nancanou's childhood had been passed without brothers or sisters, there had been given her, according to the well-known custom of plantation life, a little quadroon slave-maid as her constant and only playmate. This maid began early to show herself ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... place!" said Mrs. Sherman, with tears in her eyes. "No one ever had a happier childhood than I passed under these old locusts. Every tree seems like a friend. I would be glad for Lloyd to enjoy the place as ...
— The Little Colonel • Annie Fellows Johnston
... biologist. But this advantage of early art may be overestimated; for the nature of beauty is better revealed in its maturer manifestations, even as the purposes of an individual are more fully, if not more clearly, embodied in maturity than in youth or childhood. ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... Charles Darwin's childhood and youth afforded no intimation that he would he, or do, anything out of the common run. In fact, the prognostications of the educational authorities into whose hands he first fell were most distinctly unfavourable; and they counted the only boy of original genius ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... travel, and in a position to gratify her adventurous inclinations. Her means were somewhat limited, it is true, for she had done much for her husband and her children; but economy was natural to her, and she retained the simple habits she had acquired in her childhood. She was strong, healthy, courageous, and accomplished; and at length, after maturing her plans with anxious consideration, she took up her pilgrim's staff, ...
— The Story of Ida Pfeiffer - and Her Travels in Many Lands • Anonymous
... the book borrows its name has for its heroine a little French girl brought up in an old chateau in Normandy, by an aunt who is a recluse and devote. A child of this type, transplanted suddenly while still in childhood to the realistic atmosphere of prosperous New York, must inevitably have much to suffer. She is puzzled; she is lonely; she has no one to direct her conscience. The quaint little figure, blindly trying to guess the riddle of duty under these unfamiliar conditions, ...
— Sara Crewe - or, What Happened at Miss Minchin's • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... for much of this emotional hyperesthesia is sown in childhood. From birth until the end of the eighth year should be one grand holiday. During this time the child develops very rapidly, especially during the first two years of life. And at the end of the eighth year the brain has attained to within a few ounces of its full ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... keenly in the recollection of my childhood, than the feelings of terror which I experienced when forced to go to bed without the protecting light of a lamp. Then it was that dread, indefinite ghosts lurked behind every door, hid in every clothes-press, or lay in ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood
... fiesta, porque desde muchacho fui aficionado a la Caratula, y en mi mocedad se ne ivan los ojos tras la Farandula." In a literal version the passage may run thus:—"Go, good people, God be with you, and keep your merry making! for from childhood I was in love with the Caratula, and in my youth my eyes would lose themselves amidst the Farandula." According to Pineda, La Caratula is an actor masked, and La Farandula is a kind ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... widow's nautical absurdities. At such times, Rose seemed to be her aunt's guardian and protectress, instead of reversing the relations, and she entirely forgot herself the many reasons which existed for wishing that she had been placed in childhood, under the care of one better qualified than the well-meaning relict of her uncle, for the performance of ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... book, or who wrote it; from which I imagine that much of his reading was of the purblind sort that ignorant grown-up people do, without any sort of literary vision. He read this book perpetually, when he was not reading his Greek and Roman Mythology; and then suddenly, one day, as happens in childhood with so many things, it vanished out of his possession as if by magic. Perhaps he lost it; perhaps he lent it; at any rate it was gone, and he never got it back, and he never knew what book it was ...
— Boy Life - Stories and Readings Selected From The Works of William Dean Howells • William Dean Howells
... has a much larger range of models from which to choose, in one sense. His models are the people he knows by personal association day by day during various periods of his life, from childhood up. Each person he has known has left an impression on his mind, and that impression is the thing he considers. The art of painting requires the actual presence in physical person of the model, a limitation the writer fortunately does ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... little Miss Pimpernell as I entered the school- room—she always called me by my Christian name, or styled me her "boy," having known me from childhood—"Oh, Frank! Here you are at last! I am so glad to see you back again, my boy: you have just come in time to help us. I was really afraid those nasty Frenchmen had eaten you up, you have been such a long ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... this board of directors. Where else should a true woman be found? Where else has she always been found but by the fevered brow, the palsied hand, the erring intellect, aye, God bless them, from the cradle to the grave the guide and support of the faltering steps of childhood and the weakening steps of ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... one by one the heavy tears gathered in her eyes, as memory came back to her of Armand, the companion and darling of her childhood, the man for whom she had committed the deadly sin, which had so hopelessly imperilled her ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... still pattered and the gale cried. And all at once, above the sound of wind and water, there came a wild rapping at the main door of the house, the alarum of a very crouse and angry traveller finding a hostel barred against him at unseasonable hours. A whole childhood of fairy tale rose to my mind in a second; but the plain truth followed with more conviction, that likely here was no witch, warlock, nor fairy, but some one with a better right to the tenancy of Dal-ness than seven broken men with nor let nor tack. ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... a letter yes'd'y, by the way, from our mootual son, Artemus, Jr., who is at Bowdoin College in Maine. He writes that he's a Bowdoin Arab. & is it cum to this? Is this Boy as I nurtered with a Parent's care into his childhood's hour—is he goin' to be a Grate American humorist? Alars! I fear it is too troo. Why didn't I bind him out to the Patent Travellin Vegetable Pill Man, as was struck with his appearance at our last County Fair, & wanted him to go with him and ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... victories over their northern neighbours; who did not take to the weapon, and were unable to stand for a moment against the English archers, who not only loved it as a sport, but were compelled by many ordinances to practise with it from their childhood. ...
— Both Sides the Border - A Tale of Hotspur and Glendower • G. A. Henty
... You have put me out of conceit with my blank verse by your Religious Musings. I think it will come to nothing. I do not like 'em enough to send 'em. I have just been reading a book, which I may be too partial to, as it was the delight of my childhood; but I will recommend it to you—it is "Izaak Walton's Complete Angler!" All the scientific part you may omit in reading. The dialogue is very simple, full of pastoral beauties, and will charm you. Many pretty old verses are interspersed. This ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... was always silent when questioned about his early life; and all that Lupin knew was that he had been an orphan since childhood and that he had lived all over the place, changing his name and taking up the queerest jobs. The whole thing was a mystery which no one had been able to fathom; and it did not look as though the police would ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... worlds would she have committed that one thoughtless act, had she known how contemptible it would make her in the estimation of him whom she most cared to please! Henry Moore of all others was the object of her especial regard. From their childhood they had been thrown constantly together, and, until the coming of her cousin among them she had appropriated him to herself as a lawful and undisputed right. All the villagers had looked upon their ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... named Louisa Simms, died when I was very young; and to my grandmother I am indebted for the very little kindness I received in my early childhood; and this kindness could only be shown me at long intervals, and in a hurried way, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... received him with downcast eyes and a demeanour of humility, though she was resolved to flare up against him if he should attack her too cruelly. But the man was as mild to her and as kind as ever he had been in her childhood, when he would kiss her, and call her his little nun, and tell her that if she would be a good girl she should always have a white dress and roses at the festival of St Nicholas. He put his hand on her head and blessed her, and did ...
— Nina Balatka • Anthony Trollope
... front,"—when the winds of heaven are hushed to gentle airs, and the cloudless moon looks down upon the scene, tipping the crests of the lazy waves with silver,—that the memory and imagination of the wanderer are busy; it is then that the scenes of childhood and of manhood—the forms of friends, more loved because sundered from them by thousands of miles of water and land—all rise before him in original freshness ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... fondness. It seemed only yesterday that Cherry, a rosy-cheeked sturdy little girl in a checked gingham apron, had been trotting off to school; to him it was yesterday that she had been a squarely-built baby, digging in the garden paths, and sniffing at the border pinks. He had followed her exquisite childhood with more than a father's usual devotion, perhaps because she really had been an exceptionally endearing child, perhaps because she had been given him, a tiny crying thing in a blanket, to fill the great gap her mother's going had left in his heart. He had sympathized ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... was born in New York City, but early moved with his parents to East Hampton, the most eastern town on the jutting southern point of Long Island. Here in the charming little village he passed his childhood, a leader among his playmates, and a favorite among his elders. His slight form, rounded face, beautiful features and graceful bearing combined to attract also the marked attention of every stranger ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... the school, for which the children pay in part or in whole, and make that an education which, by the aid of the school nurse, will in time affect a change in habit. In short, the problem is this: Shall the children suffer in childhood and become a burden on society in adult years, or shall society protect itself from future expense by community care now? "Because finding diseases and defects does not protect children unless discovery is followed ...
— Euthenics, the science of controllable environment • Ellen H. Richards
... of the girls' names that she would like to ask; and Mrs. Ripwinkley looked at it with a smile. There was Ada Geoffrey, the banker's daughter, and Lilian Ashburne, the professor's,—heiresses each, of double lines of birth and wealth. She could remember how, in her childhood, the old names sounded, with the respect that was in men's tones when they were spoken; and underneath were Lois James and Katie Kilburnie, children of a printer and a hatter. They had all been chosen for their purely personal qualities. ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... murderer and the assassin stalk abroad in thy streets. But it matters not where I go, thy days of equity, when every citizen, it mattered not how humble, was free, shall ever live with me. Days of childhood innocence, the shouts of the children, the clang of the school bell, the rippling of the rills, the hum of bees will be the means of helping me to forget thy latter days of turmoil and strife. ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton
... laugh he had told her that each trip should be his last. Did it never occur to him how his promise might be fulfilled? It did to Susan; and often and often she had trembled at the thought. She had been brought up by praying parents, and had been taught from her childhood to pray, but she could not pray now—she dared not—she felt it would be a mockery. She was wrong, though. She could not pray that God would protect her husband in his lawless occupation, but she might have prayed that her merciful Father in heaven would change his heart—would lead him from the ...
— The Ferryman of Brill - and other stories • William H. G. Kingston
... could, "it is just because Mrs. Bradley is neither a thief nor a drunkard nor worse, dear Miss Jencks, that she does not feel the necessity for weeping. The emotionalism of the convert is a curious thing, and the sense of sin together with vague memories of that Story, connected with childhood and childhood's innocence, may produce a state of mind responsible for a great deal that we could ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... to love you yet?" raged the daughter. "You knocked every bit of love out of me when I was yet a kid. All the memories of childhood I have is your everlasting cursing and yelling that ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... conversion, and there is nothing more potent than family prayers. No child ever gets over having heard parents pray for him. I had many sound threshings when I was a boy (not as many as I ought to have had, for I was the last child and my parents let me off), but the most memorable scene in my childhood was father and mother at morning and evening prayers. I cannot forget it, for I used often to be squirming around on the floor and looking at them while they were praying. Your son may go to the ends of the earth, and run through the whole catalogue of transgression, but he will remember the ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... a big and buoyant man, striding destructively about the nursery floor of my childhood, and saluting my existence by slaps, loud laughter, and questions about half herrings and half eggs subtly framed to puzzle and confuse my mind. I didn't see him for some years until my father's death, and then he ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... thinking in this obstructive fashion and wishing that I could write about my childhood like Tolstoi, about my girlhood like Marie Bashkirtseff, and about the rest of my days and my work like many other artists of the pen, who merely, by putting black upon white, have had the power to bring before their readers not merely themselves "as they lived," ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... immortality and his sinfulness will sometimes be made to stand out in overpowering light, when the busy pursuits of day are not able to turn the soul from wandering towards eternity-(Cheever). Bunyan profited much by dreams and visions. "Even in my childhood the Lord did scare and affright me with fearful dreams, and did terrify me with dreadful visions." That is a striking vision of church fellowship in the Grace Abounding, (Nos. 53-56); and an awful dream ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... ignorance, no rest but sleep, no hope but death! Long leagues must interpose between himself and his home; he should never kiss his mother again, or kneel with his father in the holiness of prayer. The recollections of his childhood would be crushed out by agonizing experiences of bondage; he would forget his name and the face of his friends, and at last preserve only the horrible consciousness that he was the chattel ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... married, their husbands became so many new and devoted sons to this gentle, sympathetic, and yet firm-natured woman. Nor were the daughters-in-law less attached to her, and the grandchildren who in due time began to haunt Fox How. In my own life I trace her letters from my earliest childhood, through my life at school, to my engagement and marriage; and I have never ceased to feel a pang of disappointment that she died before my children were born. Matthew Arnold adored her, and wrote to her every week of his ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Scott, better known as Mrs G. G. Richardson, the daughter of a gentleman of considerable property in the south of Scotland, was born at Forge, her father's family residence, in the parish of Canonbie, on the 24th of November 1777, and spent her childhood and early youth amidst Border scenes, Border traditions, and Border minstrelsy. It is probable that these influences fostered the poetic temperament, while they fed the imaginative element of her mind, as she very early gave expression to her thoughts ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... From "Rhymes of Childhood," copyright 1902, used by special permission of the publishers, ...
— Pinafore Palace • Various
... our young folks. It requires genius to conceive a purely imaginary work which must of necessity deal with the supernatural, without running into a mere riot of fantastic absurdity; but genius Miss Ingelow has, and the story of Jack is as careless and joyous, but as delicate, as a picture of childhood. ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... pleasant companionship, it was not the dark dreary evenings or the long solitary nights, it was not the absence of every slight and easy pleasure for which young hearts beat high, or the knowing nothing of childhood but its weakness and its easily wounded spirit, that had wrung such tears from Nell. To see the old man struck down beneath the pressure of some hidden grief, to mark his wavering and unsettled state, to ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... impossible for them to obtain preferment and competence here? or because they are estranged by oppression and scorn? or because they cherish no attachment to their native soil, to the scenes of their childhood and youth, or to the institutions of government? or because they consider themselves as dwellers in a strange land, and feel a burning desire, a feverish longing to return home? No. They lie under no odious disabilities, whether imposed by public opinion or by legislative ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... demanded: to execute any caprice or order of her patient's, her chiefest joy and reward. He felt himself environed by her love, and thought himself almost as grateful for it as he had been when weak and helpless in childhood. ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... street through which I always, in my childhood, walked slowly each Sunday, on my way to and from church, was a spot to detain lingering footsteps—a beautiful garden laid out and tenanted like the gardens of colonial days, and serene with the atmosphere of a worthy old age; a garden which had ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... could be got from "Indian meal stir-about" (a kind of weak and watery porridge made from maize). And it was not the children of the labourers alone who endured this bleak and starved and sunless childhood; the offspring of the smaller struggling farmers were often as badly off—they were all the progeny of the poor, kept poor and impoverished by landlordism. This further bond of blood and even class relationship also bound the farmers and labourers together—the ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... years and station; and, indeed, in all cases in which the cares and sorrows of life have anticipated their usual date, and have fallen, as they sometimes do, with melancholy prematurity to the lot of childhood, I have observed the result to have proved uniformly the same. A young mind, to which joy and indulgence have been strangers, and to which suffering and self-denial have been familiarised from the first, acquires a solidity and an elevation which no other discipline ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... hammer fell, out of the ruin it made were shaped marvels of form; Olympian castles and giant statues, images of such savage creatures as roamed devastating the earth in days when man was in his childhood. ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Mr. Smalls' small room with an atmosphere that was of the smoke, smoky. Smoke produces thirst; and the cup, punch, egg-flip, sherry-cobblers, and other liquids, which had been so liberally provided, were being consumed by the members of the party as though it had been their drink from childhood; while the conversation was of a kind very different to what our hero had anticipated, being for the most part vapid and unmeaning, and (must it be confessed?) occasionally too highly flavoured with improprieties ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... him, especially from his affection, application, manners, and form. It is discoverable from his AFFECTION, which is the affection of knowing, of understanding, and of growing wise; the affection of knowing takes place in childhood, the affection of understanding in youth and in the entrance upon manhood, and the affection of growing wise takes place from the entrance upon manhood even to old age; from which it is evident, that his nature or peculiar temper is inclinable to form ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... had owned since the days of Louis XII; a grey pile that stood upon a thickly wooded height,—a chateau with a banquet hall, where kings had dined, with a chapel where kings had prayed, with a flowering terrace high above a gleaming river. It was there that his childhood had been passed. And as he spoke, she listened with mingled feelings, picturing the pageantry of life in ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... that is said of the childhood and the youth of Jesus, though we should have expected fuller information on so extraordinary a subject. Joseph and Mary went up to the feast of the passover every year, and it was the custom to take children of that age with them. They journeyed in a ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... led a very placid, quiet life. Her existence has been a boat that has always lain in harbour—" She suddenly looked up: "I spent my childhood at Dieppe, and that often suggests images to me," she observed complacently, and then she went on in quite another ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... the bird that most frequents the surrounding woods or fields? How pleasant to have one's hamlet called Nightingale, or Whippoorwill, or Goldfinch, or Oriole! The home of Zosephine and Bonaventure's childhood was in the district known as Carancro; in bluff English, ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... "Yes; our childhood's home is that, I suppose, be it a cottage or a castle, revisited in imagination at life's close," sighed ...
— The Heiress of Wyvern Court • Emilie Searchfield
... he could without previous research, Chester had turned again to Mlle. Yvonne to let her finish telling—inspire'd by an incoming course of the menu—of those happy childhood days when she and her sister and the unfortunate gentleman from whom they had bought Aline's manuscript went crayfishing in Elysian Fields street canal, always taking the dolls along, "so not to leave them lonesome"; how the dolls had visibly enjoyed the capture of each crayfish; and how she ...
— The Flower of the Chapdelaines • George W. Cable
... end of my life proves to be as unfortunate as the beginning. I was born in London some fifty and more years ago, in a Whitechapel slum, of drunken and profligate parents, so it is little to be wondered at that my career has been anything but virtuous or respectable. In my early childhood—if it may be called so—I was beaten and starved, set to beg, forced to thieve, and never had a kind word said to me or a kind deed done to me. No wonder I grew up a callous, hardened ruffian. As the twig is bent, so will the ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... routine, habit, the memories of childhood, have so much influence upon men, that hardly had they entered the church, than several of the quarryman's followers respectfully took off their hats, bowed their bare heads, and walked along cautiously, as if to check the noise of their footsteps on the sounding ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... so huge that it filled the screen, and it had not become drab, neither gray-green or brown. No, it was cake frosting, and icicles, and raindrops against the sun, and all of the bright, unattainable Christmas tree ornaments of his childhood. ...
— The Marooner • Charles A. Stearns
... that day were not over-precise. But though the woman had had a husband and two sons, one boy had died in childhood, the other had been taken away by the husband who repudiated her. She was the more ready to mother this child dropped mysteriously into her lap one day by an Indian woman whose tongue ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... sense of growing things. Rossetti instinctively saw faces, and only faces, and he would have seen them if he had lived in the loneliest countryside, and he would never have learned to distinguish between oats and barley if he had had fields of them about his door from childhood. It was in the beauty of women, and chiefly in the mysterious beauty of faces, that Rossetti found the supreme embodiment of beauty; and it was in the love of women, and not in any more abstract love, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... within, into the burgh, to Colgrim his brother, who was to him the dearest of all men alive. Baldulf caused to be shaved to the bare skin his beard and his chin, and made him as a fool; he caused half his head to be shorn, and took him in hand a long harp. He could harp exceeding well in his childhood; and with his harp he went to the king's host, and gan there to play, and much game to make. Oft men him smote with wands most smart; oft men him struck as men do fool; each man that met him, greeted him with derision; so never any man knew of Baldulf's appearance, but that it were a fool ...
— Brut • Layamon
... behind a mass of clouds, and over the harbour to the southeast stretched a bow of promise, with the town of Cagayan standing at one end of the arc like the proverbial pot of gold for which we hunted in childhood. ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... is the very thing that alarms me," returned Dantes. "Man does not appear to me to be intended to enjoy felicity so unmixed; happiness is like the enchanted palaces we read of in our childhood, where fierce, fiery dragons defend the entrance and approach; and monsters of all shapes and kinds, requiring to be overcome ere victory is ours. I own that I am lost in wonder to find myself promoted to an honor ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... in light suits of chain armour, with helmets and short swords, all complete. Then they mounted two horses that Francoeur had tied up in the forest, and set forth for the kingdom of the gnomes. At the end of an hour's hard riding, they came to the cavern which Francoeur had heard from childhood led into the centre of the earth. Here they dismounted, and entered cautiously, expecting to find darkness as thick as what they had left outside. But they had only gone a few steps when they were nearly ...
— The Olive Fairy Book • Various
... my childhood and girlhood, our family passed from wealth to poverty. My father and only brother were killed in battle during the Civil War; our slaves were freed; our plantations melted from my mother's white hands during the Reconstruction days; our big ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... right of every person, from childhood on, to have access to knowledge. In our form of society, this right of the individual takes on a special meaning, for the education of all our citizens is imperative to the maintenance and invigoration of ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... of fairyland, that ring Perpetual chime for childhood's flower-sweet spring, Sang soft memorial music in his ear Whose answering music shines about us here. Soft laughter as of light that stirs the sea With darkling sense of dawn ere dawn may be, Kind sorrow, pity touched with gentler scorn, Keen wit whose shafts were sunshafts ...
— A Channel Passage and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... to bring it; but it angered Father Francis Xavier more than many a more repulsive thing would have done. It seemed so utterly imbecile and babyish to him, he had got so far away from innocence and smiles and childhood himself, that the sight of them irritated him. The young Indian girl had a long and almost unpronounceable name. Pere Ignace had baptized her Marie, and the new name had gradually taken the place ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... should be the priest of its various deities. An eclipse of the sun announced his approaching end; and his life, with that of his scholar Isidore, [153] compiled by two of their most learned disciples, exhibits a deplorable picture of the second childhood of human reason. Yet the golden chain, as it was fondly styled, of the Platonic succession, continued forty-four years from the death of Proclus to the edict of Justinian, [154] which imposed a perpetual silence on the schools of Athens, and excited the grief and indignation of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... repose; his tastes were accomplished, his character seemed soft and gentle; but beneath that calm exterior, flashes of passion—the nature of the poet, ardent and sensitive—would break forth at times. He had scarcely ever, since his earliest childhood, quitted those retreats; he knew nothing of the world, except in books—books of poetry and romance. Those with whom he lived—his relations, an old bachelor, and the cold bachelor's sisters, old maids—seemed ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 4 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Constantine Stubbs, was in this respect, as well as in many others, like the rest of his species. He had his ruling passion, and, but that his father had made him a GENTLEMAN, he was sure nature had intended him for the Roscius of his age. From his earliest childhood, when he used to recite, during the Christmas holidays, "Pity the sorrows of a poor old man," and astonish his father's porter (who had a turn that way himself) with his knowing, all by heart, "My name is Norval, on the Grampian hills,"—to his more matured efforts of, "Most ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 365 • Various
... with detestation the principles to which Henry had sacrificed his life. From childhood he was staid, earnest, and iron-willed; to whatsoever he put his hand, he did it thoroughly, and it was his pride to receive aid from no man. Intensely practical, he early discerned the truth that ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... our childhood! how affection clings And hovers round thee with her seraph wings! Dearer thy hills, though clad in autumn brown, Than fairest summits which the cedars crown! Sweeter the fragrance of thy summer breeze Than all Arabia breathes along the seas! ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... elder daughter, born in 1854, was eighteen months senior to Toru, the subject of this memoir, who was born in Calcutta on the 4th of March, 1856. With the exception of one year's visit to Bombay, the childhood of these girls was spent in Calcutta, at their father's garden-house. In a poem now printed for the first time, Toru refers to the scene of her earliest memories, the circling wilderness of foliage, the shining tank with the round leaves of the lilies, the murmuring dusk under the vast ...
— Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan • Toru Dutt
... was very vivid indeed along the line from Dover to London at that time. For a space they traversed just such a country-side as he had known since his childhood, the small oblongs of field, hedge-lined, of a size for pigmy horses to plough, the little roads three cart-widths wide, the elms and oaks and poplars dotting these fields about, little thickets of willow beside the streams; ricks of hay no higher ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... Frenchman, continued (1823) by Von Hammer an Austro-German, and finished by Mr. John Payne (1882-84) an Englishman. But we must not forget that it is wholly and solely to the genius of the Gaul that Europe owes "The Arabian Nights' Entertainments" over which Western childhood and youth have spent so many spelling hours. Antoine Galland was the first to discover the marvellous fund of material for the story-teller buried in the Oriental mine; and he had in a high degree that art of telling a tale which ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... thoughts unworthy of his position. They reminded him of his own childhood, when he had dreamed of becoming one of the Lesser Gods, or even Zeus himself! Zeus had provided the best answer to those dreams, Forrester knew. "Now I am a man," Zeus had said, "and ...
— Pagan Passions • Gordon Randall Garrett
... and with a furtive, childish movement I hid my two hands behind my back. I never saw her again, for the grudge I had owed her from my childhood must have been apparent under my politeness ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... shoulders, and say, "Mon Dieu, Signore! how should I know?—it has always been so." The ignorance and superstition of the picturesque gondolier, with his fluttering blue hatband and gorgeous sash, are most enchanting. His lack of knowledge is like the ignorance of childhood, when life has neither beginning nor end; when ways and means present no vexatious problems; when if food is not to be had for the simple asking, it can surely be secured by coaxing; when the day is for frolic and play, and the night for ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... this moment, an overwhelming desire gripped him, a desire to pour over Erickson's pages once again, to re-create, even for a brief moment, the comfort and happiness of his childhood. ...
— Small World • William F. Nolan
... History has a good deal of the natural course of argument and meditation: and that it is not a very foreign idea that these heresies are the loud thinking {121} of a mighty host, as it outgrows its childhood, and ...
— The Prayer Book Explained • Percival Jackson
... A childhood land of mountain ways, Where earthy gnomes and forest fays, Kind, foolish giants, gentle bears, Sport with the peasant as he fares Affrighted through the forest glades, And lead sweet, wistful little maids Lost in the woods, forlorn, alone, To princely ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... yellowe and blacke, fierce and cruell lookes, thinne haired vpon the upper lippe, and pitte of the chinne, light and nimble bodied, with short legges, as if they were made naturally for horsemen: whereto they practise themselues from their childhood, seldome going afoot about anie businesse. Their speech is verie sudden and loude, speaking as it were out of a deepe hollowe throate. When they sing you would thinke a kowe lowed, or some great bandogge ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation v. 4 • Richard Hakluyt
... as long as people did not upset his poor head. Mrs Verloc, turning towards her recumbent husband, raised herself on her elbow, and hung over him in her anxiety that he should believe Stevie to be a useful member of the family. That ardour of protecting compassion exalted morbidly in her childhood by the misery of another child tinged her sallow cheeks with a faint dusky blush, made her big eyes gleam under the dark lids. Mrs Verloc then looked younger; she looked as young as Winnie used to look, and much more animated than the Winnie of the Belgravian mansion days had ever allowed ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... without question and conclusive. She was living in a school for young ladies: seen daily by the ladies who kept that school, and by the pupils. In one of her letters to Mrs. Hall, she writes, "I have lived nearly all my life, since childhood, with the same people. The Misses Lance were strict, scrupulous, and particular,—moreover, from having kept a school so long, with habits of minute observation. The affection they feel for me can hardly be undeserved. I would desire nothing more than to refer to their opinion." ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... Industry Readers. 1. Stories of Woods and Fields. 2. Stories of Childhood and Nature. 3. When the World was ...
— Sure Pop and the Safety Scouts • Roy Rutherford Bailey
... too well aware of the facts which gave the speech its trenchant significance. He himself had inherited owing to the death of an elder brother in early childhood. But there was no younger brother to step into his own shoes, and failing an heir in the direct line of succession the title and entailed estate would of necessity go to Rupert Vallincourt, a cousin—a gay and debonair young rake of much charm of manner and equal absence of virtue. ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... the Comtesse of Z—— would say, I can exactly illustrate the position and attitude of the two of them from a recollection of my childhood. I remember that in one of my nursery books of forty years ago there was a picture entitled "The Lady in Love With A Swine." A willowy lady in a shimmering gown leaned over the rail of a tessellated pig-sty, in which an impossibly clean hog stood in an attitude of ill-mannered immobility. With the ...
— The Hohenzollerns in America - With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and other impossibilities • Stephen Leacock
... avoided speaking to my adversary or even approaching him; thus I resisted the temptation to insult or strike him, a useless form of violence at a time when the law recognized the code. But I could not remove my eyes from him. He was the companion of my childhood and we had lived in the closest intimacy for many years. He understood perfectly my love for my mistress and had several times intimated that bonds of this kind were sacred to a friend, and that he would be incapable ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... Whispering in gentleness and leaning low Out of its majesty, as child to child. I think upon it all with heart grown wild. Hearing no voice, howe'er my spirit broods. No whisper from the dense infinitudes, This world of myriad things whose distance awes. Ah me; how innocent our childhood was! ...
— By Still Waters - Lyrical Poems Old and New • George William Russell
... to be written is one dealing with the childhood of authors. It would be not only interesting, but instructive; not merely profitable in a general way, but practical in a particular. We might hope, in reading it, to gain some sort of knowledge as to what environments and conditions are most conducive to the growth of the creative faculty. We ...
— Poems By a Little Girl • Hilda Conkling
... fathers and brethren" of the United Presbyterian Church. He was born at Tweedsmuir, in the upland pastoral district of Peeblesshire, where his father was a farmer. Here he spent the first years of his childhood, a circumstance which had probably more influence on his future character and tendencies than might be supposed on the first blush. "The boy is father to the man," and while he was yet a mere child, Dr. Ker was laying up a store of memoranda bearing ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans |
