"Middle age" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... table, examining the Planchette contrivance, were four persons. Chris's gaze roved over them, and he was aware of a guilty sorrow-pang as he paused for a moment on Lute's Aunt Mildred and Uncle Robert, mellow with ripe middle age and genial with the gentle buffets life had dealt them. He passed amusedly over the black-eyed, frail-bodied Mrs. Grantly, and halted on the fourth person, a portly, massive-headed man, whose gray temples belied the youthful solidity of ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... his rarest quality. Far on in middle age, when men begin to lie down with the bestial goddesses, Comfort and Respectability, the strings of his nature still sounded as high a note as a young man's. He loved the harsh voice of duty like a call to battle. He loved courage, enterprise, brave natures, ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... fluent French, and after giving the required information, volunteered anecdotes relating to various well-known people whom he had guided in the desert. Diana watched him interestedly. He seemed a man of about middle age, though it was difficult to guess more than approximately, for the thick, peaked beard that hid both mouth and chin made him look older than he really was. His beard had been his only drawback from Diana's point of view, for she judged men by their mouths. Eyes were untrustworthy evidences ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... War and Peace, but that does not necessarily mean that it will cover a great many years; they are in fact no more than the years between youth and middle age. But though the wheel may not travel very far in the action as we see it, there must be no doubt of the great size of the wheel; it must seem to turn in a large circumference, though only a part of its journey is to be watched. The revolution of life, ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... full of people, most of them with anxious faces, and all having some object or other in their hands. The pawn-shops do their best business in the evening. A man and a woman, both advanced in middle age, well fed, parsimoniously washed and possessing profiles of an outline disquieting to Christian prejudices, leaned over the counter, handled the articles offered them, consulted each other in incomprehensible monosyllables, talked volubly ...
— A Cigarette-Maker's Romance • F. Marion Crawford
... as a manly exercise, as physically hard in some of its aspects as any other field sport. During the lifetime of those of us who will no more see middle age this recreation has become actually popular, and it is generally supposed that the multiplication a hundredfold of rod-and-line fishermen in a generation is explained by the cheaper and easier modes of locomotion, the increase of cheap literature pertaining to the sport, ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... heard that his boy was so ill, the king, who was now a man of middle age, threw himself upon the floor of his room in the bitterness of his grief and prayed to God to spare ...
— Children of the Old Testament • Anonymous
... fold of her cloak covered her chin. He could see now only a wisp of face like a sickle of a silver moon, and the feeling that disturbed him in the day did not return to him. He again imagined her cold and hard, a woman of middle age, battered by the world, an adventuress who did not fear to go forth in the night upon ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... is full of Aunt Sophys, unsung. Plump, ruddy, capable women of middle age. Unwed, and rather looked down upon by a family of married sisters and tolerant, good-humoured brothers-in-law, and careless ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... replacing it with something new. In the course of these changes the conservative elements in man and in society, voluntarily or under coercion, give up the old and learn how to use the new. The learning process is always more or less painful, especially to people past middle age. ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... attention riveted on the remarkable man before him. The head and face of Savonarola are familiar to us by many paintings and medallions, which, however, fail to impart what must have been that effect of his personal presence which so drew all hearts to him in his day. The knight saw a man of middle age, of elastic, well-knit figure, and a flexibility and grace of motion which seemed to make every nerve, even to his finger-ends, vital with the expression of his soul. The close-shaven crown and the plain white Dominican robe gave a severe and statuesque simplicity to the lines ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... been"—those saddest words of tongue or pen. The pensive sorrow of E. G. W.'s countenance had misled many people—not but what the sorrow was genuine enough (Scraggsy explained it in four words, "I've been a Mormon"), but the expression of a blighted, helpless youth carried into early middle age was an appearance only: I mean it was nothing to bank on in dealing with Zeke. Still, if you could see those eyes, dimmed with a settled melancholy; those mustachios, which, absorbing all the capillary possibilities of his head, drooped like weeping willows ...
— Mr. Scraggs • Henry Wallace Phillips
... it, eh?" chuckled Webb Atchison, a fine and prosperous figure of a bachelor past his first youth but not yet arrived at middle age, and with the look of one who does what he pleases with other people. "Well, it wasn't her plan, I assure you. She was horror-stricken when she ...
— The Brown Study • Grace S. Richmond
... was a person of sufficient importance to warrant a paragraph quite to herself. She was a woman of middle age, with a wealth of curling, iron-gray hair, which she tucked away under a plain white cap. Her figure was large and grandly developed. She wore a blue print gown, carefully pinned back about her hips, thus disclosing her scarlet flannel petticoat; both garments faded by time and frequent ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... largely devoted to jewelers, wholesale and retail. Rodney followed Mr. Woods into a store about midway between Broadway and Nassau Street. A pleasant looking man of middle age ...
— Cast Upon the Breakers • Horatio Alger
... it could invest with poetical attraction. The room was small, though not squalid in its character and appliances. The bed-curtains, of a dull chintz, were drawn back, and showed the form of a man, past middle age, propped by pillows, and bearing on his countenance the marks of approaching death. But what a countenance it still was! The broad, pale, lofty brow; the fine, straight, Grecian nose; the short, curved lip; the full, dimpled chin; the stamp of genius in every line and lineament;—these still ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... perversity characteristic of gout and middle age, combined, no doubt, with a not unnatural modicum of jealousy, maintained that one such fete should be sufficient amusement for one night. She might take her choice of one; he would on no account permit her to attend ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... country. Dick saw stalls for four horses, but no horses. They put his own horse in one of the stalls, and gave him corn and hay. Then they walked back to the house, and entered a large room, where a stalwart woman of middle age had ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... learned—calm, stagnant pools of superlative surface pleasure. No one learns things worth while when he is too happy or too successful. That is why success is a wiser and more enduring thing when it comes at middle age. The young man or woman has not been tried out, has not had to struggle and discover personal limitations. It's the struggle that ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... name a softer expression stole over the Lady Houstoun's face, and she glanced quickly at a portrait hanging over the ample fireplace, which represented a gentleman of middle age, dressed in the uniform of a colonel of the American army. As she turned her eyes again on Lucy, she saw that hers were fastened on the ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh
... leading a multitude of captives." What can be plainer than that? The same thought is also contained in another passage, a passage which was the source of those tremendous pictures so frequent in the cathedrals of the Middle Age, Christus spoliat Infernum: "God hath forgiven you all trespasses, blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, and took it away, nailing it to Christ's cross; and, having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a show of them, openly triumphing over them in ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... to provide herself with a servant, Iris was able to report the discovery of a responsible person who told the truth—an unmarried lady of middle age. ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... Wenamon, who held the sacerdotal title of "Eldest of the Hall of the Temple of Amon," and instructed him to proceed to the Lebanon to procure the timber. It is evident that Wenamon was no traveller, and we may perhaps be permitted to picture him as a rather portly gentleman of middle age, not wanting either in energy or pluck, but given, like some of his countrymen, to a fluctuation of the emotions which would jump him from smiles to tears, from hope to despair, in a manner amazing to any ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... not mean that a constructive program of industrial education would affect 22 per cent of the present school enrollment. All the weight of educational opinion and experience is on the side of excluding the children of the lower and middle age groups as too young to profit by any sort of industrial training, while the evidence collected by the survey goes to show that of the remainder less than one-fifth of the girls and one-fourth of the boys are likely to ...
— Wage Earning and Education • R. R. Lutz
... last should be classed as sculpture—stands very, very close indeed to Phidias; his art is more complete and less perfect. But three hundred years have gone since the death of Michael Angelo, and to get another like him the world would have to be steeped in the darkness of another Middle Age. And, passing on in our inquiry, we notice that painting reached its height immediately after Michael Angelo's death. Who shall rival the splendours, the profusion of Veronese, the opulence of Tintoretto, the richness of Titian, the pomp of Rubens? Or who ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... have thought her one to love truly and deeply. Nevertheless, since she married—as girls in France do—not to please herself, but her parents, she made a mariage de convenance. Monsieur de Merville was a sober, sensible man, past middle age. Not being fond of poetry, and by no means coveting a professional author for his wife, he had during their union, which lasted four years, discouraged his wife's liaison with Apollo. But her mind, active and ardent, did not the less prey upon itself. At ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... abandons in growing old is, perhaps, after all not worth having. The chief part of youth is but excitement; often both unwise and unhealthy. The same pen which has written, with a morbid feeling, that "there is a class of beings who do not grow old in their youth and die ere middle age," tells us also that "the best of life is but intoxication." That passes away. The man who has grown old does not care about it. The author at that period has no feverish excitement about seeing himself in print; he does not hunt newspapers for reviews and notices. He is content to wait; he ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... only by his own earlier writings, but as the representative in Scotland of the University of Paris, recalled to his countrymen the great struggle of the Middle Age in favour of freedom—and especially of church freedom against the Popes. That struggle indeed had Germany rather than France for its original centre, and it was under the flag of the Empire that the progressive despotism ...
— John Knox • A. Taylor Innes
... arch-roofs of which were completed in 1275. Then he commenced the facade of the church and its towers from a plan so bold and sublime that the conception of it places Erwin for ever at the head of the architects of the middle age[1]. In 1276 they laid the foundation of the northern tower; to consecrate the spot, the bishop walked solemnly round it, then took a trowel in his hand and thrust it into the ground, as a sign for beginning the work. They relate that a quarrel having occured ...
— Historical Sketch of the Cathedral of Strasburg • Anonymous
... wheelchair sped up to them. Sitting in it was a fat man of middle age, with pendulous jowls and a totally bald head. His expression was ...
— Double Take • Richard Wilson
... you, Hot Lavender: Mints: Savory: Marjoram; The Marigold that goes to bed with the sun, And with him rises, weeping: these are the flowers Of middle summer, and I think they are given To men of middle age." ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... most accounts, that the Greeks, at any rate, the Suliotes, who are in affinity with me of 'bread and salt,'—expect that I should march with them, and—be it even so! If any thing in the way of fever, fatigue, famine, or otherwise, should cut short the middle age of a brother warbler,—like Garcilasso de la Vega, Kleist, Korner, Joukoffsky[1] (a Russian nightingale—see Bowring's Anthology), or Thersander, or,—or somebody else—but never mind—I pray you to remember me in ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... the limp body and surveyed the field. His anger had departed and he was again a cool and self-possessed American gentleman of middle age. ...
— The Boy Allies in Great Peril • Clair W. Hayes
... not most great men utter sentiments hard to be reconciled with one another, yet with equal sincerity? Webster enforces free-trade at one time and a high tariff at another, as light or circumstances change. Gladstone was in youth and middle age a pillar of the aristocracy; later he was the oracle of the masses, yet a lofty realism underlay all his utterances. The writings of Solomon present life in different aspects, and yet they are ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord
... the form of an organised kingdom, as the Vandals attempted in Africa; or of a mere band of brigands, as did the Goths in Asia Minor, under Gainas; or of a praetorian guard, as did the Varangens of the middle age; or as religious invaders, as did the Crusaders, ended only in the corruption and disappearance of the colonists. That extraordinary reform in morals, which, according to Salvian and his contemporaries, ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... the orient when the gracious light Lifts up his burning head, each under eye Doth homage to his new-appearing sight, Serving with looks his sacred majesty; And having climb'd the steep-up heavenly hill, Resembling strong youth in his middle age, Yet mortal looks adore his beauty still, Attending on his golden pilgrimage: But when from highmost pitch, with weary car, Like feeble age, he reeleth from the day, The eyes, 'fore duteous, now converted ...
— Shakespeare's Sonnets • William Shakespeare
... afterward, when a colonel, was Howe's engineer—used to ride with her in the spring of '69. He was a tall, stout man of middle age, and much spoken of as likely to marry my Aunt Gainor, although she was older than he, for, as fat Oliver de Lancey said years after, "There is no age to a woman's money, and guineas are always young." My aunt, Gainor Wynne, was still a fine gentlewoman, and ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... to ask questions that would puzzle Plato, And all the schoolmen of the Middle Age,— If to make precepts worthy of old Cato, Be deemed philosophy, ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... swinging company of girls came the band, marching to the tapping of the drum only. Then after a space came a figure, pathetic, arresting, moving—a woman, obviously a workman's wife, of middle age, grey, workworn, and carrying a babe of a few months in her arms, marched alone. Plainly dressed, her grey head bare, she walked proudly erect but with evident signs of weariness. The appearance of that lone, weary, grey-haired woman and her helpless babe struck hard upon the heart ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... than entered upon that decade which carries one to the full blossom of manhood which we term the beginning: of middle age, and yet a brief sojourn at the capital of the nation had made him old. His hair was already turning gray when the late session of Congress began its sittings; it grew grayer still, and rapidly, ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... all forlorn," defended Winifred. "But I will admit that the unsuspected longings of some of them are pathetic. Here is a case in point. I had a caller this very afternoon—a woman of middle age who used to work for us. She was in distress because she had received an offer of marriage. From a worldly standpoint she is foolish not to accept the man, for he is worthy of her, and could provide a home. When I ventured to say as ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... in native splendor after transplanting. Milly was the exception, proving the rule. Bred in New Orleans, steeped in its atmosphere, its traditions, a cook of degree, and daughter of a cook to whom, though past middle age, she paid the most reverent homage, she yet kept her magic touch amid the crush and hurly-burly of New York town, albeit she never grew acclimated nor even content. This in spite of a mistress she adored—in virtue of having served her ten years down in the home city. When at last ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams
... youths reposed calmly. Robert watched Willet with interest, and he was impressed for the thousandth time by his great strength, and the lightness of his movements. When he was younger, the disparity in years had made him think of Willet as an old man, but he saw now that he was only in early middle age. There was not a gray hair on his head, and his face ...
— The Shadow of the North - A Story of Old New York and a Lost Campaign • Joseph A. Altsheler
... a man of middle age, thin to emaciation and having lank, dark hair. His face was ghastly white, and he lay with his head thrown back and with his arms hanging out upon either side of the bunk, so that his listless hands rested upon the carpet. It was a tragic ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... Judge, an English aristocrat and lady, a Seattle lawyer, sober, thoughtful and of middle age, who had been introduced to me by a friend upon sailing, and who kindly kept me in sight when we changed steamers or trains on the trip without specially appearing to do so; a nice old gentleman going to search for the body of his son lost in the Klondyke River a few weeks before, ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... towards him inquiringly, and his visitor, carefully setting down the magazine, rose slowly to his feet. The young man's surprise at finding his rooms occupied was increased by the appearance of his visitor. He was apparently of more than middle age, with deeply-lined face, tall, and with an expression the coldness of which was only slightly mitigated by a sensitive mouth that seemed at once cynical and humorous. He was of more than ordinary height, and ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... arms powerful, and his head erect. He had not been born a cripple, but had been disabled for life, when a tiny child, by a cart passing over his legs above the knees. He was talking to a lad a year or so younger than himself, while a strong, hearty-looking woman, somewhat past middle age, stood at a wash-tub. ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... too great, but it is often unwise. All affectionate women who have reached middle age must have received many confidences from girls who have been mistaken in supposing themselves loved by men who have grown tired of them. A girl often suffers intensely in such a case, and it is hard to know how much is due to wounded love, ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... smiled amiably at the one woman in the room who had lingered in the pleasant spaces of middle age. "Very well. I'll be as little technical as possible. . . . As you know, I ran a hospital in Buda Pesth during the war. After the revolution broke out I was forced to leave in secret to escape being murdered. I was on Bela ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... there is evidence that while Titian, after his stay at the Papal court, remained firm as a rock in his style and general principles—luckily a Venetian and no pseudo-Roman,—his imagination became more intense in its glow, gloomier but grander, than it had been in middle age—his horizon altogether vaster. To a grand if sometimes too unruffled placidity succeeded a physical and psychical perturbation which belonged both to the man in advanced years and to the particular moment in the century. Even in his treatment of classic myth, ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... quitted, presently his attention was directed to the gateway of a handsome park, whose mansion was faintly seen in the distance. Hurrying towards him, down the avenue of limes, was a strange figure. It was that of a man of middle age; clad in Quaker garb, yet with an extravagance of cut and detail which seemed antiquated even for England. He had evidently seen the young man approaching, and his face was beaming with welcome. If Paul had doubted that ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... a large and handsome person of middle age, with a great mass of fair hair, and she gave me the feeling that in her case the body of a woman was inhabited by the ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... in a fashion modelled on Bishop Butler, and full of logical resource, good and, often it must be owned, bad. It was a mind which unfolded first under the plain, manly discipline of an old-fashioned English country parsonage, where the unshowy piety and strong morality and modest theology of the middle age of Anglicanism, the school of Pearson, Bull, and Wilson, were supreme. And from this it came under the new influences of bold and independent thought which were beginning to stir at Oxford; influences which were at first represented by such ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... and lazily musing, a woman of middle age came and prostrated herself before me, touching the ground with her forehead. She carried in her robe some bunches of flowers, one of which she offered to me with folded hands. She said to me, as she offered it: "This is an offering ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore
... not quite realize what was the matter, but she knew that she was no longer so fair to see, and that the combination of herself and a new gown was not what it had been. She felt as if she had reached the last page of her book of life, and the ennui of middle age came over her. She had not reached the last page; she was, of course, mistaken; but she had reached a paragraph so tremendous that it seemed to her the climax, as if there could be nothing beyond it. She was married—that is, she had been pronounced ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... I saw a man that I was to see again. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man, well on in middle age, with all the evidence of good health and immense strength—strength not alone of body but of will. Unlike most men I was accustomed to about me, he was smooth-shaven. Several days' growth of beard showed that he was already well-grayed. ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... Unfortunately, during most of that time life was made too easy for him. He knew now that he could write, but he had no desire to write for a living. Probably he felt that such a course would be in some way not quite suitable for a man of fashion. At all events, ten years passed, and middle age was at hand before the promising author began to fulfill his promise. Not till 1819 appeared his next literary venture, conceived in a more serious spirit, and launched with many misgivings as the first performance of the professional ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... it was a firm article of undergraduate belief that the librarian, Mr. J.M. Atterworthy, had sat behind his battered desk from that date on to the present time. As a matter of fact, he was but just gliding down-hill from middle age, having behind him the same number of years as the active and high-spirited president of the college. And yet there was ground for the undergraduate conviction that "Old J.M." as he was always called, was an institution whose beginnings dated back into the ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... Dick, "I'll be on my guard." Yet he did not feel the presence of danger. Youth perhaps becomes more easily hardened in war than middle age, or perhaps it thinks less of consequences. The Union cannon, many of great weight and power, had begun already to fire upon Vicksburg. Huge shells and shot were rained upon the city. Pemberton had two hundred guns facing the river and the army, but ...
— The Rock of Chickamauga • Joseph A. Altsheler
... seventy-two years old, and had known and experienced many phases of life,—the tumultuous passions and the wild revolt of youth, the cooler and more self-contained life of middle age, and the sombre color of a rather hopeless old age. Even in age she had her pleasures, however. She delighted in her grandchildren, in books, in pictures, in nature, and in work. Her unwearied pen ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... comfort to be with Julia and Freeland, that unreal Romeo and Juliet of middle age. They were very proud of her, and elated to have her with them, took her everywhere, introduced her to all their friends, and insisted upon her being photographed for the Press, and in due course she had the shock ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... and infant genius are cases in which the awakening has been more rapid than ordinary. On the other hand, cases are known where the soul does not awaken as rapidly as the average, and the result is that the person does not show signs of full intellectual activity until nearly middle age. Cases are known when men seemed to "wake up" when they were forty years of age, or even later in life, and would then take on a freshened activity and energy, surprising those who ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... years were gone King Dietmar died, having scarcely reached middle age, and Theodoric succeeded him in the kingdom. And he was the most renowned amongst princes; his fame spread wide and far over the whole world, and his name will abide and never be forgotten in all the lands ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... forward to meet the stranger. He saw a man apparently of early middle age, smooth-shaven, wearing long iron-gray hair that hung below his sombrero, the locks curling slightly at the bottom. The eyes that regarded Tom were keen and twinkling, full ...
— Grace Harlowe's Overland Riders Among the Kentucky Mountaineers • Jessie Graham Flower
... elapsed after Tom vacated his seat, when a pleasant-looking gentleman of middle age, who had been sitting just behind them, rose and took the ...
— Helping Himself • Horatio Alger
... appearance to the wearers. Light fitting buckskin leggings, fringed on the outer side, encased their legs, and a pair of deerskin mittens dangled from the ends of a string which was slung around the neck. One of the men was past middle age, the other a young fellow of ...
— Ungava Bob - A Winter's Tale • Dillon Wallace
... exactly like its fellows, neither better nor worse; and the door was opened by a neat, prim woman, small, and of middle age. Commonplace she was, no doubt, ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... eighteen, was a performer in the regimental band, and after a battle passed a night in a ditch and escaped in disguise, to England, where he eked out a precarious livelihood by teaching music. He supported himself until middle age as an organist. In much of his later work he was greatly aided by his sister Caroline. When be discovered a sixth planet he became famous, and devoted himself exclusively to astronomy, training his only son to follow in his ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... of a hospitable entertainment, is an obsolete word, and that those who speak of "giving a party" prove themselves, by the mere expression, to be fogeys whom the rushing stream of London amusements has long since thrown up on the sandy bank of middle age, there to grow dull and forget that their legs were ever apt for the waltz, or their digestions able to cope with lobster mayonnaise at 2 A.M. Yet, though he who thus speaks may not be as smart as a swell, or as much up to date as a church-parade-goer, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 18, 1891 • Various
... a man of middle age, a stout man with a florid countenance and dewy blue eyes; his skin was of that quality that is easily roughened by the wind. He always spoke rapidly, and ...
— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung
... which precedes and follows daily work, contributes greatly to the development of these evils, so that men who begin this work in early youth are far from reaching the stature of women who work above ground; that many die young of galloping consumption, and most miners at middle age of slow consumption, that they age prematurely and become unfit for work between the thirty-fifth and forty-fifth years, that many are attacked by acute inflammations of the respiratory organs when exposed to the sudden change from the warm ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... M. de Lesseps is very striking. Though long past middle age, he has a fresh and even youthful appearance. Both face and figure are well preserved; his slightly curling gray hair sets off in pleasing contrast his bronzed yet clear complexion, his bright eye, and genial smile. He is somewhat over the medium stature, possessed ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... do," that we suddenly appreciate that, even if we have ourselves failed, yet if we can by our experience help someone else to succeed, our life will not be utterly vain. Altruism is the philosophy of middle age. ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... home, lived on a wide, maple-shaded street in the city of Ripton, cared for by an elderly housekeeper who had more edges than a new-fangled mowing machine. The house was a porticoed one which had belonged to the Austens for a hundred years or more, for Hilary Vane had married, towards middle age, Miss Sarah Austen. In two years he was a widower, and he never tried it again; he had the Austens' house, and that many-edged woman, Euphrasia Cotton, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... He was a paunchy, graying man in his sixties, who had probably been a rather handsome lady-killer for the first half-century of his life, but he was approaching middle age now, which has a predictable effect on ...
— A Spaceship Named McGuire • Gordon Randall Garrett
... Doctor's curiosity was somewhat piqued by what he could see of the schoolmaster's character, and he was desirous of finding out what sort of a life such a man could have led in a world which he himself had found so rough a one; through what difficulties he had reached middle age without absolutely vanishing away in his contact with more positive substances than himself; how the world had given him a subsistence, if indeed he recognized anything more dense than fragrance, like ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... her son, "If I may make so bold, You quote the new-style poem, not the old. The Northern Farmer whom you think so sage Is not born yet. This is the Middle Age." ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 11, June 11, 1870 • Various
... of voice and action with the child when soothing her at the door had also made Sebastian think, and the child's fondness for this soft-faced, weak and kindly woman was setting a mark on the man's mind, well into middle age as she was. He began to ask himself whether the blighted tree could ever put forth leaves again? whether there was balm in Gilead yet for him, and nepenthe for the past in the happiness of the future. He thought ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... developed to a high standard of physical fitness, marching along the excellent Indian roads, with a certainty of a good water supply at their night's camping place, and accompanied in many cases by travelling canteens and soda water machines. In our ranks were to be found many men of middle age, unused to active life, and many boys whose physique had not had time to respond to military training. Some had but recently joined us and were not acclimatised, others had not recovered their strength after the dysentery of Gallipoli. Roads or canteens ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... I can for obvious reasons say little. They are a good deal like such officials anywhere. The warden is a Pennsylvania Dutchman; the deputy a young Kentuckian, gigantic and fresh faced; his first assistant is a stalwart man of middle age, a good deal of a martinet, but the men are inclined to like him because they see in him a solid, masculine creature, who stands pat, says what he means, and does what he says. Then there are the prison ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... her peasant's costume, did all the cooking and cleaning, assisted by a daughter or a cousin. When you met her out of doors she would be carrying one of the immense loads peasant women do carry up hill and down dale in Germany. She was hale and hearty in her middle age, and always cheerful and obliging. At that inn, too, we never had a meal indoors from May till October. Everything was brought out to a summer-house, from which we looked straight down the village, its irregular Noah's Ark-like houses, and ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... rough, insolent in manner. In our passage of the main street I saw just three decent looking people—one was evidently a gambler, one a beefy, red-faced individual who had something to do with one of the hotels, and the third was a tall man, past middle age, with a clean shaven, hawk face, a piercing, haughty, black eye, and iron gray hair. He was carefully and flawlessly dressed in a gray furred "plug" hat, tailed blue coat with brass buttons, a buff waistcoat, trousers of the same shade, and a frilled shirt front. Immaculate ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... the sentiment of the ideal life is none other than man's normal life as we shall one day know it. Matthew Arnold saw George Sand in his enthusiastic youth when she was in the serenity and dignity of middle age at Nohant. ...
— Cobwebs of Thought • Arachne
... calls up another tale of devotion, of betrayal, and of death, with the last struggle for a Roman Republic at the end of the Middle Age. It was a hopeless attempt, made by a brave man of simple and true heart, a man better and nobler than Rienzi in every way, but who judged the times ill and gave his soul and body for the dream ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... keeper) to come and decide about some trees that must be cut down, when a most miserable group emerged from one of the side alleys and slipped by so quickly and quietly that we couldn't speak to them. A woman past middle age, lame, unclothed really—neither shoes nor stockings, not even a chemise—two sacks of coarse stuff, one tied around her waist half covering her bare legs, one over her shoulders; two children with her, a ...
— Chateau and Country Life in France • Mary King Waddington
... just mentioned were seen walking on the spar deck forward. The man was well past middle age, of fine, rather sharp features and with thick gray hair. The woman did not appear to be above the ...
— Dave Darrin After The Mine Layers • H. Irving Hancock
... sustained on one of the stone seats, which are commonly used by the servants. I had her carried info the court, and made such applications as had been recommended by the faculty. The patient was a robust woman of middle age, accompanied by her mother, both having come in from a distant village, to raise a few sous by selling matches. In making the applications, I had occasion to observe the means by which these poor people sustain life. Their food consisted of fragments of hard ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Benoni and Rosa at the last. And so surely has the author established his foothold on the new ground that he can even bring in Edvarda, the "Iselin" figure from Pan, once more, thus linking up his brave and lusty comedies of middle age with the romantic tragedies of his youth, making a comprehensive ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... work can be extracted from bad brains, and that shallowness, affectation, and levity can, by some strange chemistry, be transmuted into a substitute for genius. Do we not all, if we have reached middle age, remember some idiot (of course he was an idiot!) at school or college who has somehow managed to slip past us in the race of life, and revenge ourselves by swearing that he is an idiot still, and that idiocy is a qualification for good fortune? Swift somewhere says that a paper-cutter ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... Willis had grown gray. That is, there were more or less becoming threads of silver in her maiden tresses, and the dignity of middle age had added inches to her waist and a few interesting lines to her forehead. There was no new Sir Galahad on the horizon even of her day-dreams, and her mother was in failing health. Mrs. Willis continued now to fail for five years—years which taxed her daughter's strength, though not her ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... of middle age, with neat, well-fitting clothes, which, in the smallest arrangement of pattern and make-up, bespoke ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... during the long, peaceable, and economical reign of Henry VII., whether from the exhaustion which was the fruit of the civil wars, or from more general European influences, had made a sudden transition from the powerful confusion of the middle age, to the regular tameness of modern times. Henry the Eighth has, therefore, somewhat of a prosaic appearance; for Shakspeare, artist-like, adapted himself always to the quality of his materials. If others of his works, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... Grant Allen, George Egerton, Henry Harland, Pett Ridge, W. W. Jacobs (who alone seems inexhaustible). I dare say I could recall as many more names with a little effort. I may be succumbing to the infirmities of middle age, but I do not think the present decade can produce any parallel to this list, or what is more remarkable, that the later achievements in this field of any of the survivors from that time, with the sole exception ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... unable to detect it. Indeed, at the moment he rose, there was something very fine and very impressive in his figure. He is, as most people know, a man of unusual height; hard exercise and the ride across country have kept him from having any of that tendency to embonpoint which destroys in middle age so many a fine figure. On the contrary, there is not a superfluous ounce of flesh on that tall, alert figure; it is the figure of a trained athlete rather than the figure one would associate with a nobleman in the end of a self-indulgent and ever-eating and over-drinking ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... long exercised the authority of a chieftain, before the Rebellion of 1745 entailed upon him a participation in occupations still more arduous. He had, in short, arrived at middle age when he was called upon to support ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson
... should be delicate and careful in his approach, told her that it was of Cartoner he had come to speak. While the delicacy and care showed her that he had guessed something, it also opened up a new side to his character. For the susceptibilities of men and women who have passed middle age are usually dull, and often quite dead, to the sensitiveness of younger hearts. It almost seemed that he divined that Wanda's heart was sensitive and sore, like an exposed nerve, though she showed the world a quiet face, such as the Bukatys had always shown through ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... middle age, he grew more domineering in tone, more noble in his dreams, and more foolish in much of his conduct. He was soon to shine in each of these three lights. He returned from America in a fury. For two years he had been busy in Pennsylvania ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... a representation in fresco of the Heavenly Glory; and although he did not finish it, what he did perform shows that he used the utmost diligence. In this work he began a series of saints with such beautiful variety in the faces of the youths, the men of middle age and the old men, that nothing better could be desired, and those blessed spirits exhibit so sweet and so united a style that it appears all but impossible that they could have been done by Stefano at that time. He however did execute them, although no more ...
— The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors & Architects, Volume 1 (of 8) • Giorgio Vasari
... therefore, the gospel, the real gospel, is as unlike the views of some of its interpreters, as creation, in all its boundless extent and beauty, is unlike the paltry scheme of some wretched scholastic in the middle ages. The middle age of science and civilization is now terminated; but Christianity also had its middle age, and this, perhaps, is not yet fully terminated. There is still a remainder of the old spell, even the spell of human authority, and by which a certain cramp ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... of the room was the man who sat at the desk. He was a man solidly built and, by his voice, of middle age. His face the new-comer could not see and for excellent reason. It was hidden behind a veil of fine silk net which had been adjusted over the head like a loose bag and tightened under ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... before her were short ones and so was that of her son, Edward VII., who came after her. He reigned only nine years and died at the age of sixty-eight; by far the greater part of his long life had been spent preparing, as Prince of Wales, for the throne he filled so short a time. He was well over middle age before ...
— The Children's Book of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... stands on Ponteglos Quay to this day. And all that is left of "Flowing Source" hangs on the wall of its best parlour—four dark oak timbers forming a frame around a portrait, the portrait of a woman of middle age and comfortable countenance. In the right-hand top corner of the picture, in letters of faded gold, runs the legend—VXOR ...
— Wandering Heath • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... grown keener in her sharp middle age. As it played about her, Harriett cowered; it was like being exposed, naked, to a cutting wind. Her mind ran back to her father and mother, longing, like a child, for their shelter and support, for ...
— Life and Death of Harriett Frean • May Sinclair
... Carthage had many libraries, or what the libraries were worth. It is no less true that the author of The City of God is the last of the Latin writers who had a really all-round knowledge. It is he who is the link between modern times and pagan antiquity. The Middle Age hardly knew classical literature, save by the allusions and ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... them, and they talked till daylight. He told them much of himself. The responsibility of a great fortune had not appealed to him; he had been honest in his preference for the vagabond life, but realized, now that he was well launched upon middle age, that it was only becoming and decent for him to alter his ways. Billy's liking for him, that had struggled so rebelliously against impatience and distrust, warmed to the ...
— The Madness of May • Meredith Nicholson
... showed that it was the remains of a tall man, past middle age, undoubtedly, and there was no evidence that he came to his death by any wound which effected a fracture of any of his bones. The cot on which the skeleton reposed was made of pieces of wood, in a complete state of decay, and there was not a vestige of clothing, ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Exploring the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... ears and nostrils filled with irritating dust, and a feeling that collar and cuffs were, as ladies phrase it, "a sight to behold," Rachel's heoric enthusiasm ebbed to the bottom. Ushered into the Surgeon's office she was presented to a red-faced, harsh-eyed man, past the middle age, who neither rose nor apologized to her for being discovered in the undress of a hot day. He montioned her to a seat with the wave of the fan he was vigorously using, and taking her letter of introduction, adjusted eye-glasses upon a ripe-colored nose, and read ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... antecedent, and a monarch out at elbows stood for me as the last irony of our mortal life. Here was a king whose misfortunes could find no parallel. He had been in his youth the hero of a high adventure, and his middle age had been spent in fleeting among the courts of Europe, and waiting as pensioner on the whims of his foolish but regnant brethren. I had heard tales of a growing sottishness, a decline in spirit, a squalid taste in pleasures. Small blame, I had always thought, to so ill-fated a princeling. And now ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... we've had wished on us by the ton resembles the real thing just about as much as maneuvers look like the first Battle of the Marne, say, when the Germans didn't know where they were at; went out quail hunting and struck a jungle full of tigers....Why not? When most of 'em were written by men of middle age snug beside a library fire with mattresses on the roof—in America not even a Zeppelin to warm up their blood. But that doesn't matter. The public took it all as gospel. Ate it up. Now it is fed ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... time in the night three women were brought into the kiva. These women had a cincture of cotton about their loins, but were otherwise nude. One was very old, another of middle age, and the third quite young, perhaps fourteen or fifteen years old. As they stood in a corner of the kiva their faces and bodies were painted by the bald-headed priest. For this purpose he filled his mouth with water and pigment and dexterously blew a fine spray over the faces, necks, shoulders, ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell
... "and pointed out the exact spot where he killed himself, and invented all sorts of impressive details, and I've found an old portrait of Lord John Russell and put it in her room, and told her that it's supposed to be a picture of the uncle in middle age. If Ada does see a ghost at all it certainly ought to be old Hatch-Mallard's. At any rate, ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... continued to read a great deal, but her husband's influence had diverted her mind toward works of history and travel, and these she devoured with eager interest. But she had not given up her old fancy for romance. Nearly everything she read was mingled in her mind with Middle Age legends and tales of strange adventure. Euphemia's frequent reference to a trip to Europe had fired Pomona's mind, and she was now more wildly anxious for the journey than any of us. She believed that it would entirely free Jonas from the chills and fever that still seemed to permeate his being. ...
— The Rudder Grangers Abroad and Other Stories • Frank R. Stockton
... picture of Cebes, in which the Divine Comedy of Dante was sketched in Plato's time, the description whereof has been preserved for us, and which many painters of the middle age have reproduced by this description, is a monument at once philosophical and magical. It is a most complete moral synthesis, and at the same time the most audacious demonstration ever given of the Grand Arcanum, of that secret whose revelation would overturn Earth and ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... beasts, because they were democrats, proclaiming to the slave and to the barbarian a spiritual freedom and a heavenly citizenship, before which the Roman well knew his power must vanish into naught? Who, during the invasion of the barbarians, protected the poor against their conquerors? Who, in the middle age, stood between the baron and his serfs? Who, in their monasteries, realized spiritual democracy,—the nothingness of rank and wealth, the practical might of co-operation and self-sacrifice? Who delivered England from the Pope? Who spread throughout ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... somehow or other, we found ourselves for the first time placed agreeably, and not formally, in Mrs Jamieson's house. Lady Glenmire, now we had time to look at her, proved to be a bright little woman of middle age, who had been very pretty in the days of her youth, and who was even yet very pleasant-looking. I saw Miss Pole appraising her dress in the first five minutes, and I take her word when she ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... vicious and ill-conditioned in many respects, in consequence of the spirits being confined in a narrow compass, and unable to exercise their functions. A person with a spherical head seldom lived beyond middle age. A long oblique head denoted lust and intemperance, and a flat cranium caused one to have a ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... him that question, for fear it might suggest some mortifying ideas. After having been twelve months at Mr. P. R.'s, and having received his own and his family's wages, which amounted to eighty-four dollars; he came to see me on a week-day, and told me, that he was a man of middle age, and would willingly have land of his own, in order to procure him a home, as a shelter against old age: that whenever this period should come, his son, to whom he would give his land, would then maintain him, and thus live altogether; he therefore required my advice ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... that be conceded) of southern soldiers is easily accounted for. The northern soldiers had been carefully selected by competent surgeons. They were physically perfect, or nearly so. They were in the bloom of early manhood or the strength of middle age—not an old man among them, not a diseased man among them, not a broken-down constitution among them. But multitudes of the southern, enrolled by conscription, were physically unfit. Many were much too old or too young. Said our General Grant, "To fill their ranks, they have robbed the cradle ...
— Lights and Shadows in Confederate Prisons - A Personal Experience, 1864-5 • Homer B. Sprague
... week, a man of middle age, and of distinguished appearance, came to see her. In speaking of him, Ida always said "Monsieur" with an air of such respect that one would have supposed him to be at the court of France in the days when the brother of the king ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... middle age Had slightly pressed its signet sage, Yet had not quenched the open truth And fiery vehemence of youth; Forward and frolic glee was there, The will to do, the soul to dare, The sparkling glance, soon blown to fire, Of hasty love or headlong ire. His limbs were cast in manly could ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... vigorously alive; in Lucinda herself he has drawn a heroine as charming as any in that long gallery that now stretches between her and the immortal Dolly. In short, those novel-readers who are (shall I say?) beginning to demand the respect due to middle age will enjoy in these pages the threefold reward of present interest, retrospection and a comforting sense that the literary judgment of their generation is here triumphantly vindicated in the eyes of unbelieving youth. What could ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 1, 1920 • Various
... edition now in sale being illustrated by Harrison Weir; it has been published in various forms, and has figured in most of the collections of prose and verse for the young that have been issued during this century. Probably to the minds of hundreds of people past middle age few lines are more ...
— The Butterfly's Ball and the Grasshopper's Feast • Mr. Roscoe
... held by a short rotund person of advanced middle age who occupied the centre of the room. In outline this person was distinctly Dutch. His face was heavily pleated, with dewlaps pendant from the jaw. He wore side whiskers that did not make a good pair and dark bushy ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... you looking at so intently, my son?" asked the gentleman who sat at his side. He was a man of perhaps middle age, and he wore spectacles, which gave ...
— Chester Rand - or The New Path to Fortune • Horatio Alger, Jr
... returning from the war with the loss of an arm, was fortunate enough to receive the appointment of postmaster, and thus earn a small, but, with strict economy, adequate income, until a fever terminated his earthly career at middle age. Mr. Graham was a rival applicant for the office, but Mr. Carr's services in the war were thought to give him superior claims, and he secured it. During the month that had elapsed since his death, Mrs. Carr had carried on the post office under a temporary appointment. She was a woman of good ...
— Do and Dare - A Brave Boy's Fight for Fortune • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... Saints parish, served under Gen. Marion. He was a firm patriot and good soldier; indeed he may well be enumerated among the martyrs to the cause of his country; for having been seized with a fever in camp, he had scarcely time to reach his home, where he expired at a middle age. He left behind him, by his last wife, two sons and a daughter; his eldest son he named after the illustrious Washington; and he has since proved himself to be highly worthy of that distinction. In this son will be readily recognised the distinguished artist, Washington ...
— A Sketch of the Life of Brig. Gen. Francis Marion • William Dobein James
... and strikingly attractive: of the dashing, brilliant type. She was not more than twenty, but there was an easy assurance in her manner that bespoke ages of conquest and not an instant of defeat. The elder was an aristocratic woman past middle age, the possessor of cold, aquiline features and smileless eyes. Her hair was almost snow white, but her figure was straight ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... heard behind him the footsteps of a horse following in his track, and a man of middle age, swarthy, robust, dressed like a semi-bourgeois, shouted to him to stop. Germain had never seen the farmer of Ormeaux; but an angry instinct led him to determine at once that it was he. He turned, and, ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... a fire of turf and logs did not need apologies for its presence, and Lady Isabel and her companion Heads of Households sat with it as their focal point, and thought, as they saw the players flitting to and fro between the showers, and the house, and the lawn tennis grounds, that middle age had privileges that ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... the name of the new head of the telephone people. He was a man of middle age, born in Lynn and bred in Boston; a long-pedigreed New Englander, whose ancestors had smelted iron ore in Lynn when Charles the First was King. He was a lawyer by profession and a university professor by temperament. His specialty, as a man of affairs, had been marine law; and his hobby ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... later, a tall, stooping man of uncertain middle age, with a cold eye and a perpetual, sour droop to his lids. At the sight of Buck the sourness became accentuated and increased still more when he observed the ashes on the floor. His only reply to Stratton's ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... thing for us as we get along into middle age," another old friend told her. He was building a magnificent house on Pacific Heights, but had recently married a second time, and was even then on his way to the steamer to welcome home his two daughters just graduated ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... even know at the moment the man was my father; though slowly, afterward, by the concurrent testimony of others, I learnt to call him so. But his relationship wasn't part of the Picture to me. There, he was only in my eyes a man—a man well past middle age, with a long white beard, now dabbled with the thick blood that kept gurgling so hatefully from the red spot in his waistcoat. He lay on his back, half-curled round toward one arm, exactly as he fell. And the revolver he had been shot with lay ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... the newspaper men departed, there came a ring at the front door. As Mary, the head servant, was out, Marion answered the ring and found at the entrance a woman of middle age, dressed in plain black, who spoke to her, in quick, ...
— Campfire Girls in the Allegheny Mountains - or, A Christmas Success against Odds • Stella M. Francis
... Alvarado, Castro, and Estenega, the members of the Junta were men of middle age, and represented the talent of California,—Jimeno, Gonzales, Arguello, Requena, Del Valle. Their dark, bearded faces, upturned to the stars, made a striking set of profiles, but the effect was marred by the silk handkerchiefs they had ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... them," she said. "At any rate, they often accompany middle age, or what is called the prime of life. And really, in your ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... created a more favourable impression. My refrain Sternite Turcas, a short and sharp solution of the Eastern Question, was selected for recital in public. I was too staid for these childish proceedings. We were often set to write a Middle Age tale, terminating with some striking miracle, and I was far too fond of selecting the cure of lepers. I often thought of my early studies in mathematics, in which I was pretty well advanced, and I spoke of it to my fellow ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... and the sly glance of the eye from under his bushy eyebrows, with which they were accompanied. That day at dinner, we had Mr. Laidlaw and his wife, and a female friend who accompanied them. The latter was a very intelligent, respectable person, about the middle age, and was treated with particular attention and courtesy by Scott. Our dinner was a most agreeable one; for the guests were evidently cherished visitors to the house, and ...
— Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey • Washington Irving
... Captivity knelt down and kissed the vacant couch, a figure advanced from the extremity of the cavern into the light. He was a man of middle age, considerably above the common height, with a remarkably athletic frame, and a strongly-marked but majestic countenance. His black beard descended to his waist, over a dark red robe, encircled by a black girdle embroidered with yellow characters, like those sculptured ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... economic defence is still only partially effective. But there is a patent defence at hand,—the defence of deception and flattery, of cajoling and lying. It is the same defence which peasants of the Middle Age used and which left its stamp on their character for centuries. To-day the young Negro of the South who would succeed cannot be frank and outspoken, honest and self-assertive, but rather he is daily tempted to be silent and wary, politic and ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... whiteness of the skin into a brownish ivory, full of charm. The eyes looked steadily out from their deep hollows; the mouth, austere and finely cut, the characteristic hands, and the unconscious dignity of movement—these personal traits made of Elsmere's wife, even in late middle age, a striking ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... better abstain from vegetables, such as potatoes, and from sweet dishes, pastry, etc., and eat largely of the green-leaf vegetables and fruits with the articles of a simple diet which build but do not fatten the body. (See Diet and Corpulence; Diet for Middle Age, and the Aged.) ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... tranquilly away. Ernest still dwelt in his native valley, and was now a man of middle age. By imperceptible degrees, he had become known among the people. Now, as heretofore, he labored for his bread, and was the same simple-hearted man that he had always been. But he had thought and felt so much, he had given so many of the best hours ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... decided note of hilarity, took place at the door, and two women entered the car, one looking back and nodding a final smiling farewell before she gave her mind to the matter in hand. They were attractive women, of late middle age, perhaps, not yet to be called old. One was large, with fine curves, gray bands of hair under her autumnal bonnet, and a dignity of bearing which suited her ample figure and melodious, rather deep voice; the other was paler, more fragile, her light hair only streaked with gray, and ...
— A Christmas Accident and Other Stories • Annie Eliot Trumbull |
