"Maturity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... accustomed to a religion of forms find it difficult to be satisfied with the religion of faith. We must be patient with them. It is not easy for them to give up the practices of childhood and it takes time for them to learn the gladness and the freedom of spiritual maturity offered ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman
... He himself had an old, worn-out, used-up appearance; while Gaston, in spite of his gray hair and weather-beaten face, was a robust man, in the full maturity ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... shedding abroad its perfume. To realise the host of enemies ever shadowing the feathered songster and its kind, we have only to remember that though four young birds may be hatched in each of fifty nests, yet of the two hundred nestlings an average often of but one lives to grow to maturity,—to migrate and to return to ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... had delighted to clothe with terror and sublimity, began to present itself under a new character to his mind; and instead of being a subject to be fondled, as it were, and caressed by the imagination, seemed as it approached maturity to manifest certain mysterious qualities, which, engendered terror ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 399, Supplementary Number • Various
... that they will feel that he is "playing fair." It has been found that if boys are given a large share in their own government, they are not only far easier to manage at the time, but grow enormously in maturity of social ideals, and are apt to become much more useful citizens because of such growth. Placing responsibility upon the boys involves trusting them, of course, but it has been found that when the matter has been presented fairly and supervised skilfully, they have always risen to the responsibility ...
— Essentials in Conducting • Karl Wilson Gehrkens
... sixtieth year, Ericsson has the appearance of a man of forty. He is in the very maturity of a vigorous manhood, and retains all the fire and enthusiasm of youth. He has a frame of iron, cast in a large and symmetrical mould. His head and face are indicative of intellectual power and a strong will. His presence impresses one, at the first glance, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... eight sons, offspring of Lord Nelson's parents, it seems remarkable that only the present Earl ever had any issue; while, of their three daughters, one died in her infancy, and the two who reached maturity, Mrs. Bolton and Mrs. Matcham, have both several children: Mrs. Bolton, as already noticed, having five now living; and Mrs. Matcham, her amiable younger sister, the lady of George Matcham, Esq. being the mother of no less than ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) • James Harrison
... several minutes silent, and Mrs. Hamilton felt too deeply pained and disappointed to speak again. Her daughter had spoken to her that morning as she had seldom done even in her childhood. Then her mother could look forward to years of reason and maturity for the improvement of those errors; now others had arisen, and if her control were once so entirely thrown aside, could she ever regain sufficient influence to lead her right. Seldom had Caroline's conduct given her so much ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... larger number of fitter offspring. Thus defence of the young by birds may be a disadvantage to the parent, but this is more than counterbalanced in the life of the species by the number of young coming to maturity and inheriting the trait. Even here natural selection favors the survival of the trait indirectly by sparing the descendants of the individual possessing it. Natural selection may always work on and through individuals without always ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... Varro, have maintained that Rome died a "natural death," the normal result of old age. It is mere fancy to suppose that nations have their birth, their maturity and their decline under an inexorable law like that which determines the life history of the individual. A nation is a body of living men. It may be broken up if wrongly led or attacked by a superior force. When ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... is that he has been possessed all his life, almost passionately, with that instinct which makes boys run to fires. His fastening upon the favorably placed, whether it was Morton in his youth, or Wilson in his maturity, was not ordinary self-seeking, not having for its object riches or power or influence. It was merely desire to see for the pure love ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... reach: five years so spent had developed a boy, nursing noble dreams, into a man fit for noble action,—retaining freshest youth in its enthusiasm, its elevation of sentiment, its daring, its energy, and divine credulity in its own unexhausted resources; but borrowing from maturity compactness and solidity of idea,—the link between speculation and practice, the power to impress on others a sense of the superiority which has been self-elaborated ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... in want of instant ready money Mr Scruby's proposition that he should leave the four bills at his own bankers', to be collected when they came to maturity, did not suit him. He doubted much, also, whether at the end of the fourteen days the money would be forthcoming. Alice would be driven to tell her father, in order that the money might be procured, and John Vavasor would probably succeed in putting impediments in the way of the payment. He must ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... remains, except to hasten to encounter the whirlwind thus raised against us? so as by promptitude to crush the fury of this rising war before it comes to maturity and strength? Nor can it be questioned that, with the favour of the supreme deity, by whose everlasting sentence ungrateful men are condemned, the sword which they have wickedly drawn will be turned to their own destruction. Since never having received any provocation, but rather ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... and the odd moments of an afternoon devoted to this reconnoitring, Tembinok' took his leave in silence. Next morning, the same undisguised study, the same silence, was resumed; and the second day had come to its maturity before I was informed abruptly that I had stood the ordeal. 'I look your eye. You good man. You no lie,' said the king: a doubtful compliment to a writer of romance. Later he explained he did not quite judge by the eye only, but the mouth as well. 'Tuppoti I see ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... relations to his fellow-men, and to the principle which in his opinion controls the universe; that there are three stages in religious development: first, the childhood of nations, when man thinks of the whole universe as created for him and centering in him; secondly, the maturity of nations, the time of national religions, when each nation believes that all true religion centers in it,—the Jews and the English, he said, being striking examples; and, finally, the perfected conception of nations, when man has the idea of fulfilling the will of the Supreme Power and ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... knew Gertrude? She thought of that earlier Delia as of a creature almost too contemptible to blame. From the maturity of her twenty-one years she looked back upon herself at seventeen or eighteen with wonder. That Delia had read nothing—knew nothing—had neither thoughts or principles. She was her father's spoilt child and darling; delighting in the luxury that surrounded ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... its name inscribed in German-looking lettering upon a pink or yellow wall and an awkward summerhouse in the angle of the garden. One of the hotels at Vevey, however, is famous, even classical, being distinguished from many of its upstart neighbors by an air both of luxury and of maturity. In this region, in the month of June, American travelers are extremely numerous; it may be said, indeed, that Vevey assumes at this period some of the characteristics of an American watering place. There are sights and sounds which evoke a vision, an echo, of Newport and ...
— Daisy Miller • Henry James
... happy? The inconsiderate mind will suppose this very probable—will say, I should be. But evil seeds that are planted in the young heart grow up with years—not so rapidly or openly as to offend—and grow to be poisonous weeds with maturity. My feelings were too devoted, too concentrative, too all-absorbing, to leave me happy, even when they seemed gratified. The man who has but a single jewel in the world, is very apt to labor under a ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... and sad than ever, but because its weariness and sorrow had no community with their ethereal nature. Wherever they might appear in their pilgrimage of bliss, Youth would echo back their gladness, care- stricken Maturity would rest a moment from its toil, and Age, tottering among the graves, would smile in withered joy for their sakes. The lonely cot, the narrow and gloomy street, the sombre shade, would catch a passing gleam like that now shining on ourselves, as these ...
— The Seven Vagabonds (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... spring and begin to mature leaves and shed leaves and drop nuts before the southern varieties. The Major and the Greenriver are perhaps somewhat different from others of the northern varieties in that their maturity date usually falls with the ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Forty-Second Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... which instigated him to it, might seem indeed something excusable in those unripened years, and considering the profession of his father, brother, and uncle; but I have often heard him mention this rashness with that regret which the reflection would naturally give to so wise and good a man in the maturity of life. And I have been informed that, after his remarkable conversion, he declined accepting a challenge, with this calm and truly great reply, which, in a man of his experienced bravery, was exceedingly graceful: "I fear sinning, though you know ...
— The Life of Col. James Gardiner - Who Was Slain at the Battle of Prestonpans, September 21, 1745 • P. Doddridge
... delicately veiled as it was. He wished to reveal his contempt of young saplings compared to the vigorous tree. It was a poetic way of comparing young snips of things with whole-souled girls, who had all the bloom of youth, and all the strength of maturity. ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... into before the parties reached the years of maturity just described. Considerable care was taken to prevent any union between near relatives; so much so, that a list of what they deemed improper marriages would almost compare with the "Table of kindred and affinity." They say that, of old, ...
— Samoa, A Hundred Years Ago And Long Before • George Turner
... of the Commissioner of Railroads shows that the total debt of the subsidized railroads to the United States was on December 31, 1890, $112,512,613.06. A large part of this debt is now fast approaching maturity, with no adequate provision for its payment. Some policy for dealing with this debt with a view to its ultimate collection should be at once adopted. It is very difficult, well-nigh impossible, for so large a body as the Congress to conduct the necessary negotiations and investigations. I therefore ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume IX. • Benjamin Harrison
... himself conspicuous by distinguished services and achievements in the first settlements of this country, and ought to be recorded as one of the patriarchs of Kentucky. He was born in Virginia, in 1753. He grew to maturity without being able to read or write; but from his early exploits he seems to have been endowed with feelings which the educated and those born in the upper walks of life, appear to suppose a monopoly reserved for themselves. It is recorded of him, ...
— The First White Man of the West • Timothy Flint
... to be made of them, they are thrown into a canoe, smashed and mixed up together, and left to stand, when the oil rises to the top, and is skimmed off and boiled. It keeps well, and is used both for lamps and cooking. Very few of the millions of eggs that are annually laid arrive at maturity. ...
— Martin Rattler • R.M. Ballantyne
... faithfulness, repay them with unmeasured kindness, and a sympathy in all their sickness and their sorrows, to a degree which I feel quite certain the most tender-hearted Christian breathing could never equal, if landed among slaves, for the first time, at years of maturity. The Christian planter's wife or daughter may be seen sitting up at night, cooking, nursing, tending an old sick and helpless slave, with nearly, if not quite, the same affectionate care she would bestow upon a sick relation, the very friendlessness of the negro stimulating ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... as young and tender shoots when we arrived at the speeding course, and have not only begun to blossom, but also to bear fruit, inasmuch as eight of our number are already holding positions as stenographers and typewriters, and we hope they will soon arrive at full maturity when we have all become experienced shorthand writers. These little plants need the tenderest care and most watchful guidance, for, if neglected ere they are larger grown, and the weeds of careless habits are not rooted out, they will be a source of great ...
— Silver Links • Various
... months of ganglingly leggy awkwardness which generally separate furry puppyhood from dignified collie maturity, he gave sure promise of his quality. He was such a dog as is found perhaps once in a generation; the super-collie that neither knows nor needs such things as whip and chain; and that learns the Law with ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... certain season of the year, when the fruit of the hundred groves of the valley has reached its maturity, and hangs in golden spheres from every branch, the islanders assemble in harvest groups, and garner in the ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... instinct, that this was the beginning of their painful labours and journeyings? and do they thus resist the imposition of burthens with all their youthful ardour and strength? A young camel remains with its mother and sucks a whole year. It is five years before the camel attains maturity ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... laughter, and her happy, drifting hours, Glad, spendthrift April, squandering her flowers, The sharp, still wonder of her Autumn days; Her chimes that shimmer from St. Michael's steeple Across the deep maturity of June, Like sunlight slanting over open water Under a high, blue, listless afternoon. But when the dusk is deep upon the harbor, She finds me where her rivers meet and speak, And while the constellations ride the silence High overhead, her cheek is on my cheek. ...
— Carolina Chansons - Legends of the Low Country • DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen
... strain of elfin wilfulness, gentle little mutinies, sad little gaieties, even a morning gleam of beauty that was not to be fulfilled. She withered in the growing, and (whether it was the sins of her sires or the sorrows of her mothers) came to her maturity depressed, and, as it were, defaced; no blood of life in her, no grasp or gaiety; pious, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... paragraph of King's "Socrates" impresses the thoughtful mind more and more by its depth and beauty, and we ask,—what might not this man in his full maturity and in scholarly leisure have contributed to enrich the philosophy of ...
— Starr King in California • William Day Simonds
... for the benefit of the little ones, another old and favourite hymn had to be sung. (None but the classical lyrics of British Christianity had found a place in the programme of the great day.) Guided by the orchestra, the youth of Bursley and the maturity ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... objects to show them how they can get along without her. She will prove most useful when she is least needed. But her presence will still be necessary, for, while she will no longer have to prod them every moment by questions, her testing will always be important, and her greater maturity of knowledge will render her suggestions and criticisms ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... lip. 'I had hopes,' he said, 'that the discourses I have held with most of you, from time to time, had ripened into more maturity than your words imply, and that we were here to execute as well as to deliberate; and for this we stand prepared. I can raise five ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... to cause those who have to do with children to feel all the emancipating and renovating power of their trust. It cannot leave us satisfied with any conventional arrangement which brings to plausible maturity a limited per cent. There are, indeed, minds strong enough to pass through the bitter years of unlearning what has been taught amiss, and then, bating no jot of heart or courage, to begin education for themselves in middle life. But often it is far otherwise. Too often, owing to the indolence ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... otherwise they would know that the griefs of their childhood were passionate abandonment, dechirants (to use a characteristically favourite phrase of modern French literature) as the griefs of their maturity. Children's griefs are little, certainly; but so is the child, so is its endurance, so is its field of vision, while its nervous impressionability is keener than ours. Grief is a matter of relativity; the sorrow should be estimated by its proportion to the ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... they erect a stage (F), in which a sentry is stationed to guard against the depredations of birds and thieves. Their corn they plant in rows (H), for it grows so large, with thick stalk and broad leaves, that one plant would stint the other and it would never arrive at maturity. They have also a curious place (C) where they convene with their neighbors at their feasts, as more fully shown on Plate 20, and from which they go to the feast (D). On the opposite side is their place ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... belong to his residence on the continent were the earliest that showed hm to have attained maturity of skill and genius. There is good reason for believing that his tragedy of Cato, whatever changes it may afterwards have suffered, was in great part written while he lived in France, that is, when ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... ADAMS, in the service of the soldiers of the Union and their families, from the beginning of the war, till near its close, entitle her to a place in the records of this volume. She was born in Fitz William, New Hampshire, at the foot of Mount Monadnock, and grew to maturity amid the beautiful scenery, and the pure influences of her New England home. Her father, Mr. J. S. Adams, was a surveyor, a man of character and influence, and gave to his daughter an excellent education. At fifteen years of age she became a teacher, and in 1856 came West for the benefit ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... under which the boy's nature was prematurely drawn up; but there can be no doubt as to the efficacy of the method. It was not coddling—Mr. Dilke was too shrewd for that—and if at a certain stage it seemed as though excessive stimulus had been given, maturity went ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... also secured their dinners, to the excellence of which I can also bear testimony. They have, in fact, reached that precise condition of well-being and independence when a culture, as high as humanity has yet reached, may be justly demanded at their hands. They have reached that maturity, as possessors of wealth and leisure, when the investigator of natural truth, for the truth's own sake, ought to find ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... doubted that with reference either to individual or national welfare agriculture is of primary importance. In proportion as nations advance in population and other circumstances of maturity this truth becomes more apparent, and renders the cultivation of the soil more and more an object of public patronage. Institutions for promoting it grow up, supported by the public purse; and to what object can it be dedicated ...
— State of the Union Addresses of George Washington • George Washington
... from this law. His first foetal form is that which is permanent in the animalcule; it next passes through ulterior stages, resembling successively a fish, a reptile, a bird, and the lower mammalia before it attains its specific maturity. The period of gestation determines the species; protract it, and the species is advanced to a higher class. This might be done by the force of certain conditions operating upon the system of the mother. Give good conditions ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... tube secretes a tiny amount of lime which instantly adheres to the shell. The animal builds his shell to the proper size and thickness and determines its ridges and whorls. Some kinds of shells take two to five years to reach maturity. Others keep growing all their lives. Color tubes are spaced like holes on a player piano roll allowing pigments to tint the shell at the right spots in the growing design. Many shells are covered with a self-made brown ...
— Let's collect rocks & shells • Shell Oil Company
... the joyous new years rushed into the world, passing on to maturity, growing older, and finally passing out, leaving the gentle, submissive girl, as they had found her, devoting herself ...
— The Rector of St. Mark's • Mary J. Holmes
... their own thoughts, and she knew, also, that to accomplish her own purpose and that of the founders of the Camp Fire, it was necessary for the girls to develop along their own lines, so that when they reached maturity they would have formed the habit of thinking things out for themselves and knowing the reason for things, as well as ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Mountains - or Bessie King's Strange Adventure • Jane L. Stewart
... upward, rising into the blue sky of the Giver of Life; there blossom forth prowess and daring, there, in the battle field, come the children to maturity. ...
— Ancient Nahuatl Poetry - Brinton's Library of Aboriginal American Literature Number VII. • Daniel G. Brinton
... the shock, which was not until the next day, one predominating feeling remained: it was a gloomy pride—a pride in his proven maturity. He was old enough, it appeared, to have been the same thing as engaged to a person who was now a Married Woman. His manner thenceforth showed an added trace of ...
— Ramsey Milholland • Booth Tarkington
... and Germany will become a more modern and larger repetition of the Third French republic. This collapse of the Germanic monarchical system may spread considerably beyond the limits of the German empire. It will probably be effected without much violence as a consequence of the convergence and maturity of many streams of very obvious thought. Many of the monarchs concerned may find themselves still left with their titles, palaces, and personal estates, and merely deprived of their last vestiges of legal power. The way will thus be opened for a ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... could she make this youngster understand that eighty is not an age at which to embark upon the process of raising a five-year-old to maturity? ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... operated as it were a kind of retreat, occupied herself with her son Georges, and strengthening herself by the memory of Chrestien, also by constantly visiting Madame d'Espard, she succeeded, without completely foregoing society, in making captive the celebrated deputy of the Right, a man of wealth and maturity, Daniel Arthez himself. In her own home and in that of Felicite des Touches she heard, between 1832 and 1835, anecdotes of Marsay. The Princess de Cadignan had portraits of her numerous lovers. She ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... "happiness" in a future separated from our present by millions of years, so that we are no more fitted now to formulate its conditions than is a child, playing with its dolls, to formulate the deeper joys and interests of its maturity, let us understand that, according to the teachings of the Esoteric Philosophy, the Devachani is surrounded by all he loved on earth, with pure affection, and the union being on the plane of the Ego, not on the physical plane, it is free from all the sufferings which would be ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant
... confronting certain great elements in human existence, from angles that are not identical. From the moment the universal initial attraction of sex to sex becomes incarnate in the first concrete sexual act till the developed offspring attains maturity, no step in the reproductive journey, or in their relation to their offspring, has been quite identical for the man and the woman. And this divergence of experiences in human relations must react on their attitude towards that particular body of human concerns ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... carelessness. When the volcanoes were rumbling, the masses were always dancing. At all times when tyrants wanted to divert the attention of the crowd, they gave the dances to their people. A nation which dances cannot think, but lives from hour to hour. The less political maturity, the more happiness does a national community show in its dancing pleasures. The Spaniards and the Polish, the Hungarians and the Bohemians, have always been the great dancers—the Gypsies dance. ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... soon as possible afterward, and clothes were made for us while it was yet in doubt whether we would be a little gentleman or a little lady. And so a man's first clothes are cunningly fashioned to do for either; worse still,—a crying indignity that, oh, thank Heaven, he cannot remember in maturity,—he is forcibly valeted by a woman, very likely young and attractive, to whom he has never ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... has not been long enough settled; but there is good reason to believe that with temperance and care the human frame will exist as long in vigor in the latter as in Europe.—Another remark as a proof of the former has been made which is that the human mind sooner arrives to maturity in America than in Europe; but this if true may be more owing ...
— First History of New Brunswick • Peter Fisher
... protection all the strength Which it was expected it would have acquired, he yet kept it from falling, till his successors, in whose administration a greater number Of favourable circumstances concurred to give it vigour, brought it to triumphant maturity. ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... into the human blood, each parasite attacks a red-blood cell, bores into it, and grows at the expense of the cell until it reaches maturity, at which time it divides up into from seven to twenty-five young parasites which are liberated and each in turn attacks a new cell. This process goes on until a sufficient number of parasites are produced in the individual to cause the symptoms of malaria, and the new subject ...
— Health on the Farm - A Manual of Rural Sanitation and Hygiene • H. F. Harris
... measure to suit a sudden change of sentiment; a wild and romantic description; and in the congruity of the accompaniment to her characters, all conceived with great purity and delicacy—she will be allowed to have discovered uncommon maturity of mind, and her friends to have been warranted in forming very high expectations ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 400, November 21, 1829 • Various
... not notice—but made no comment thereon, for, as he frequently observed to his wife when she confided to him her troubles over Betty's eccentricities, boys and girls who are in the transition stage between childhood and maturity are apt to become a trifle restless and eccentric, and it was wisdom to be for the most part judiciously blind, interfering only in cases of right and wrong. Let the little maid run with a loose rein for a time. She would soon settle down, and be the ...
— Betty Trevor • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... circumstance which in itself goes far to make the excess of the camp death-rate apparent rather than real; since, in the first place, the Boer mothers, owing to their insanitary habits and ignorance,[263] are not accustomed to bring more than one out of every two children to maturity; and in the second, the rate of infant mortality is abnormally high, as compared with that of a given community as a whole, even in the most highly developed countries. The highest monthly death-rate was that of October, 1901, when, out of a population ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... us answer this question by an illustration. Go into a forest, and look at a noble old oak which has weathered the storm for centuries; have we any doubt that the oak-tree was once a young small plant, and that it grew stage by stage until it reached maturity? Yet no one has ever followed an oak-tree through its various stages; the brief span of human life has not been long enough to do so. The reason why we believe the oak-tree to have passed through all these stages is, because we are familiar with oak-trees of every gradation in size, from ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... transition from one era to another—the Early Victorian, under whose disappearing influences he had spent his youth; the Late Victorian and Edwardian, in whose more rapidly changing atmosphere he had ripened to maturity. He had, during this transition, seen from afar the slow rising of the tidal wave of the Second Deluge; and in the summer days of 1914 he heard the first low roaring of its torrential swell, and visualised all that the overwhelming power of its bursting flood might ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... boyhood—were overhung with trees, and through its heart went the murmur of waters. Then it is, we verily believe, that in all poets, is filled with images up to the brim, Imagination's treasury. Genius, growing, and grown up to maturity, is still a prodigal. But he draws on the Bank of Youth. His bills, whether at a short or long date, are never dishonoured; nay, made payable at sight, they are as good as gold. Nor cares that Bank for a run, made even in a panic, for ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... to which he was subject, and which afterwards degenerated into tyranny, were considered only as faults incident to unguarded youth, which would be corrected when time had brought him to greater moderation and maturity. And as the contending titles of York and Lancaster were now at last fully united in his person, men justly expected, from a prince obnoxious to no party, that impartiality of administration which had long ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... racehorses have come to surpass in fleetness and size the parent Arab stock, so that the latter, by the regulations for the Goodwood Races, are favoured in the weights they carry. Lord Spencer and others have shown how the cattle of England have increased in weight and in early maturity, compared with the stock formerly kept in this country. By comparing the accounts given in old pigeon treatises of carriers and tumblers with these breeds as now existing in Britain, {36} India, and Persia, we can, I think, clearly trace the stages through which they have insensibly passed, ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... to smoke a pipe,—in college, you know. Up to my sophomore year. It was supposed to indicate maturity. But I don't believe I'd have the courage to tackle one now, Miss Crown. Not since that little gas experience over there. You see, my throat isn't what it was in those good old freshman days. Pipe smoke,—you ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... which young fellows, scarcely attained to years of maturity, met and overcame the dangers of the deep is vividly depicted in Captain George Coggeshall's narrative of his first face-to-face encounter with death. He was in the schooner "Industry," off the Island of Teneriffe, ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... 'tis: Blunt wedges rive hard knots. The seeded pride That hath to this maturity blown up In rank Achilles must or now be cropp'd Or, shedding, breed a nursery of like evil To ...
— The History of Troilus and Cressida • William Shakespeare [Craig edition]
... Michigan this fall, by the establishment of a new paper, which at first bore the title of North-west Journal, and afterwards of Detroit Journal. This sheet exhibits a marked advance in editorial ability, maturity of thought, and ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... of this death?' It is an awful thing to have to carry a corpse about on your back. And that was what Paul thought the man did who loaded his own shoulders with abortive resolutions, that perished in the birth, and never grew up to maturity. Weak and miserable is always the man who is swift to resolve and slow to carry out ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... to control the natural world for his own purposes. The sacrifices of primitive man were immensely practical in character; they were made at the crucial moments and pivotal crises of life, at sowing and at harvest time, at the initiation of the young into the responsibilities of maturity, at times of pestilence, famine, or danger. The gods were given the choice part of a meal; the prize calf; in some cases, human sacrifices; the sacrifice, moreover, of the beautiful and best. The ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... This advantage of development lasts, unless cigarettes, late hours, or grosser forms of dissipation come in to destroy it. A wholesome, sober, out-of-door life in California invariably means a vigorous maturity. ...
— California and the Californians • David Starr Jordan
... had the maturity of his age. People who looked at him saw a man, not a boy. But there was a shy and hidden side of him that was very young indeed. He was one of those men in whom youth is inherent, a legion that cling long to dreams and are ever ready ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... ministers, and to the other four classes, whenever he may think it necessary for the good of their morals. It is well known that the late Kien Long caused two of his sons to be bambooed long after they had arrived at the age of maturity, one of which, I believe, is the ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... alchemists the process of transition from baser metals into gold was conceived to be like a process of ripening fruit. The ripened product was gold, while the green fruit, in various stages of maturity, was represented by the base metals. Silver, for example, was more nearly ripe than lead; but the difference was only one of "digestion," and it was thought that by further "digestion" lead might first become silver and eventually gold. ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... with her first taste of a new pleasure, was Kate. She had outgrown her short skirts with regret; she was preparing to make them still longer with delight. She had the maturity of her motherless and quasi-fatherless state to add to the natural precocity of the mining-town girl, and of the eldest sister who has been pushed out of her childhood by the press of numbers behind her. And yet the wine of romance kept her almost babyishly young. She had ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... Life, as well as its more serious and important Business? What fond Calculations do we form of what it will be, from what it is! How do we in Thought open every Blossom of Sprightliness, or Humanity, or Piety, to its full Spread, and ripen it to a sudden Maturity! But, oh, who shall teach those that have never felt it, how it tears the very Soul; when GOD roots up the tender Plant with an inexorable Hand, and withers the Bud in which the Colours were beginning to glow! Where is now our Delight? Where is our Hope? Is it in ...
— Submission to Divine Providence in the Death of Children • Phillip Doddridge
... applied to injustice, namely, withdrawing from obedience to the rightful Imaum (as appears in the Fattahal-Kadeen). By the rightful Imaum is understood a person in whom all the qualities essential to magistracy are united, such as Islamism, freedom, sanity of intellect, and maturity of age,—and who has been elected into his office by any tribe of Mussulmans, with their general consent; whose view and intention is the advancement of the true religion and the strengthening of the Mussulmans, and under whom the Mussulmans ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... places adjacent, called Orchades, are certain trees found, whereon there groweth a certain kind of shell-fish, of a white colour, but somewhat tending to a russet; wherein are contained little living creatures. For in time of maturity the shells do open, and out of them by little and little grow those living creatures; which falling into the water when they drop out of their shells, do become fowls, such as we call Barnacles or Brant ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 16, February 16, 1850 • Various
... Haywood's maturity most renowned for their pious intent were not of the tribe of novels, but rather in the shape of letters or periodical essays such as "Epistles for the Ladies" (1749) and "The Female Spectator" (1746). Each of these forms, as practiced during the eighteenth ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... these great solemnities we cannot presume to speak, except in mythical language; we know them only in their comparative maturity. But the habit of common sacrifice, on a small scale and between near neighbors, is a part of the earliest habits of Greece. The sentiment of fraternity, between two tribes or villages, first manifested itself ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... climate most suitable, that is in the spring of the temperate zone and at the commencement of the dry season in the tropics. They grow vigorously, being supplied with abundance of food; and when they reach maturity their lives are a continual round of healthy excitement and exercise, alternating with complete repose. The daily search for the daily food employs all their faculties and exercises every organ of their bodies, while this exercise ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... contempt, as evidence of the inferiority of the female understanding, that it arrives at maturity long before the male, and that women attain their full strength and growth at twenty, but men not until they are thirty. But this Mary emphatically denies. The seeming earlier precocity of girls ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... the nature of a divergence, but rather a differential in point of cultural maturity, due to a differential in the rate of progression through that sequence of institutional phases through which the civilised peoples of Europe, jointly and severally, have been led by force of circumstance. In this movement out of the Dark Ages and onward, circumstances have fallen out differently ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... saw Stellar Lake, named by inspiration, for it looks a blue sky half full of stars; and I had my first sight of a fish hatchery. I'd no notion it could be so exciting to watch the career of trout from the egg stage up to rainbow maturity. Never shall I forget grabbing a handful of tiny wriggling fish out of the trough of water where they lived, and holding them in the hollow of my palm for an instant! They looked like big silver commas, and interrogation points, oh, but punctuations ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... great mystery of life. I told him how he owed to his father and to his mother the beginnings of his life, how God gave him to us. Now a new era opened in his childish mind. As he grows on to greater maturity he cannot help wondering how the first man was made, how the trees, and the world came to be. He is no longer satisfied with the simple statement that God made them. His eager mind wants to know, if may be, how ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... pavement of Rome if it did not compel the banks of issue to lend them the five or six millions of paper which they needed. And this the Government at last did, appalled by the possibility of universal bankruptcy. Naturally, however, the five or six millions could not be paid back at maturity, as the newly built houses found neither purchasers nor tenants; and so the great fall began, and continued with a rush, heaping ruin upon ruin. The petty speculators fell on the builders, the builders on the land companies, the land companies on the banks of issue, and the ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... school seems to have sprung up after the Peloponnesian Wars, and was perhaps founded by Eupompos, a contemporary of Parrhasios. His pupil Pamphilos brought the school to maturity. He apparently reacted from the deception motive of Zeuxis and Parrhasios, and taught academic methods of drawing, composing, and painting. He was also credited with bringing into use the encaustic ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... were, indeed, a few years of adolescence during which his health was tolerable, but they were years of apprenticeship to life and art ('pioching,' as he called it), not of serious production. Though he was a precocious child, his genius ripened slowly, and it was just reaching maturity when the 'wolverine,' as he called his disease, fixed its fangs in his flesh. From that time forward not only did he live with death at his elbow in an almost literal sense (he used to carry his left arm in a sling lest a too sudden movement should ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... grew of her unfitness, I might almost say for earth, although she still is beautiful to me. But you, Emily, are a woman of strength and will, of a strength that will grow, for your years do not yet number twenty-one; these years have already given you maturity and power, and I respect and admire you, and I believe I could worship you if you would ...
— The Harvest of Years • Martha Lewis Beckwith Ewell
... beauty of the rest of the creation, as shades in a picture serve to set off the brighter and more enlightened parts. We would likewise do well to examine whether our taxing the waste of seeds and embryos, and accidental destruction of plants and animals, before they come to full maturity, as an imprudence in the Author of nature, be not the effect of prejudice contracted by our familiarity with impotent and saving mortals. In man indeed a thrifty management of those things which he cannot procure without much pains and industry ...
— A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge • George Berkeley
... reproche," who rode forth at dawn with clean sword and shining armour, and all the world before him, yet keeping his heart for ever in his home. He was the child of her youth as Donald was the child of her maturity. Deep down in her wonderfully varied nature there were certain bottomless springs of courage, daring and enterprise which she herself had little chance of expressing and of which ...
— A Student in Arms - Second Series • Donald Hankey
... poet in it was older than the man. The impression is more strongly and more definitely conveyed by this second work, which has none of the intellectual crudeness of 'Pauline', though it still belongs to an early phase of the author's intellectual life. Not only its mental, but its moral maturity, seems so much in advance of his ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... that education means the whole bringing up of a child from infancy to maturity, not simply his school training. The reason for this assumption is that home, school, companions, environment, and natural endowment, working through a series of years, produce a character which is a unit as the resultant of these different influences and growths. ...
— The Elements of General Method - Based on the Principles of Herbart • Charles A. McMurry
... the statue of a celebrated minister,[607-4] who said that confidence was a plant of slow growth. But I believe, however gradual may be the growth of confidence, that of credit requires still more time to arrive at maturity. ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... the cold and barren regions of the far north. There man, once more partaking of the nature of his surroundings, yields as slowly to the impulses of his passions as does the ice-bound earth to the slanting rays of the summer sun. Maturity, so quick to come, so swift to leave in the torrid heats, arrives, chilled by the long winters, to the girls of Lapland, Norway, and Siberia, only when they are eighteen and nineteen years of age. But, in return ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... important of all arts at that epoch he was the most consummate artist. In the only honorable profession of the age he was the most thorough and the most pedantic professor. Having proved in his boyhood at Fontarabia, and in his maturity at Muehlberg, that he could exhibit heroism and headlong courage when necessary, he could afford to look with contempt upon the witless gibes which his enemies had occasionally perpetrated at his expense.... "Recollect," said he to Don ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... Lyttleton, Chesterfield, and other peers, proud of wearing the blue riband of literature? No! it was after he had become an author that he contemned authorship: and it was not the precocity of his sagacity, but the maturity of his experience, that made him willing enough to undervalue literary honours, which were not sufficient to satisfy ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... accustomed to call her young days; though really her spirit seemed to renew itself with every step, and her body was to the last a willing instrument. She lived in a happy completeness which allowed her to carry on the joys of youth into the maturity of years. But things did happen to her from twenty to thirty-five which could never happen again. When Dilly was a girl, she fell in love, and was very heartily and honestly loved back again. She had been ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... serious passages of Goethe's Frankfort letters is the advance in maturity and self-knowledge which they reveal when compared with those written from Leipzig. Penetrative remarks on men and things, such as give its value to his later correspondence, now begin to fall from his pen by the ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... of graces; that grace into which our Lord here gathers up all our other graces;—that greatest of graces cannot be imputed, imported, or introduced; it must be born, bred, exercised, reared up to its full maturity, and sent forth to fight and to conquer, and all within the walls of its own native town; in short, our self-denial must have its beginning and middle and end in our own heart. Antinomians there were, as our ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... man is fitted?—a man wise, firm, discreet—a man, not a child? To become such he had to grow as we grow. Bethink you now of the dangers his life was subject to in the interval—the long interval between childhood and maturity. The existing powers were his enemies; Herod was his enemy; and what would Rome have been? And as for Israel—that he should not be accepted by Israel was the motive for cutting him off. See you now. What better way was there ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... conclusion that both are the result of forces which, very slight in themselves at any moment, yet when acting through long periods of time become laid up in the form of coal and wood. All that effort which the tree has exhibited during its growth from the germ of the seed to its state of maturity, when taken as fuel, is pent up in its substance, ready, when fire is applied, to escape slowly and continuously. In the case of the coal, after the growth of the plant from which it was formed, the material underwent changes which enabled it to conserve more forces, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... immutable. The truth again is such that it transforms and unfolds itself wherever conditions are favourable in the form of a tathagata or in some other forms, in order that all beings may be induced thereby to bring their virtue to maturity. ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta |
