"Climacteric" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... spy into all my actions, and bore me everlastingly with her intolerable company. It was but the blessed morning of yesterday that she took a fancy to exhibit her beautiful person at the lounge in Bond-street;—by-the-bye, this same paragon of perfection has passed her grand climacteric, being on the wrong side of sixty;—is as thin as a lath and as tall as a May-pole;—speaks an indescribable language of the mongrel kind, between Irish and Scotch, of which she is profuse to admiration; and forgetting the antiquity ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... equal ardour, both young and old, nor is either often shocked by his visible preference of the other. I have seen a youthful beau kiss, with perfect devotion, a ball of cotton dropped from the hand of a lady who was knitting stockings for her grand-children. Another pays his court to a belle in her climacteric, by bringing gimblettes [A sort of gingerbread.] to the favourite lap-dog, or attending, with great assiduity, the egresses and regresses of her angola, who paces slowly out of the room ten times in an hour, while the ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... best dinner known to culinary science, and he had a day's start. Everything was delicious. The dinner was a symphony, starting in a low key and gradually working up in a stirring crescendo until the third course, where it reached supreme heights in climacteric effect. That third course, if done in music, would have sent men cheering to the cannon's mouth or galloping joyously in ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... of the fifth act" much more than beseems the serious character of fresco painting. In the panel which represents Hellenic civilization, Homer is the central figure; this composition pleased me least of all. Other paintings as yet unfinished present the climacteric epochs of humanity. The last of these will be almost contemporary, for when a German begins to paint, universal history comes under review; the great Italian painters did not need so much in achieving their master-pieces. But each civilization has its peculiar tendencies, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... plainly the conversation that was going on. I stopped in the street, and listened to the Dominie in continuation—"But, fair maiden, omnia vincit amor—here am I, Dominie Dobbs, who have long passed the grand climacteric, and can already muster three score years—who have authority over seventy boys, being Magister Princeps et Dux of Brentford Grammar School—who have affectioned only the sciences, and communed only with the classics—who have ever turned a deaf ear to the allurements of thy sex, and ever ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... on some of the back benches, where they had already taken up their positions for the evening, were divers unmarried ladies past their grand climacteric, who, not dancing because there were no partners for them, and not playing cards lest they should be set down as irretrievably single, were in the favourable situation of being able to abuse everybody ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... carriage he continued to me: "O yes, a nurse or patient may break that rule, or almost any rule, and the patient may live. I had a patient, left alone for a moment on the climacteric day, who was found standing at her mirror combing her hair, and to-day she's as well as you or I. I had another who got out of bed, walked down a corridor, fell face downward and lay insensible at the crack of a doorsill with the rain blowing in ...
— Strong Hearts • George W. Cable
... this special fashion the Holy Spirit affirms the Second Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ is not only the climacteric of our avouchment as sons of God, but, when held as a hope in the heart, will keep us pure and clean as ...
— Why I Preach the Second Coming • Isaac Massey Haldeman
... of central safety: the Kingdom is within. All days are judgment days: but there can be no climacteric purpose of eternity, nor any scheme of the whole. The astronomer abridges the row of bewildering figures by increasing his unit of measurement: so may we reduce the distracting multiplicity of things to the unity for which ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... had too often heard her brother remark: "Such a one is dead; he only survived his retirement two years"; she had too often heard Colleville, her brother's intimate friend, a government employee like himself, say, jesting on this climacteric of bureaucrats, "We shall all come to it, ourselves," not to appreciate the danger her brother was running. The change from activity to leisure is, in truth, the critical period for ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... peace of mind of others, much better left behind. If they are beyond a certain age they break down and have to be sent back at considerable trouble—that is to say, an escort and an ambulance cart, of which latter there are never enough. If they are below the climacteric—ever so little below it—they cause mischief of another description, and the wounded are neglected; for there is no passion of the human heart so ...
— Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories • Henry Seton Merriman
... with Wagner; the note of passion or of conflict or of tragedy is never forced. His personages love and desire, exult and hate and die, with a surprising economy of vehemence and insistence. Yet, unrhetorical as the music is, it is never pallid; and in such truly climacteric moments as that of Golaud's agonized outbreak in the scene with Melisande, in the fourth act, and the ecstatic culmination of the final love-scene, the music supports the dramatic and emotional crisis with ...
— Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande - A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score • Lawrence Gilman
... in which Cato came upon the stage, was the grand climacteric of Addison's reputation. Upon the death of Cato he had, as is said, planned a tragedy in the time of his travels, and had for several years the four first acts finished, which were shown to such as were ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... Henry, looking at Jessie, "he is really a remarkable man. My son has such confidence in him that he seemed quite relieved when I had passed my grand climacteric and could get on his list. You know he takes no one under sixty-three. By the way, governor," he added, turning around with some ado, so as to face George, "I heard he had been treating your rheumatism lately. Has he seemed ...
— The Old Folks' Party - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... ladder. And then, stifling a startled little cry, her hand closed on the key, and closed, as it had closed on that first night when she had returned here in the role of Gypsy Nan, on a piece of paper wrapped around the key. The days of isolation were ended with climacteric effect; the pendulum had swung full the other way—to-night there was both a ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... hit gits to pitchin'." The hired man must have been touching up mean whiskey himself. Meanwhile, Mart seemed to be having spells of troubled slumber. He would snore gently, accentuate said snore with a sudden quiver of his body and then wake up with a climacteric snort and start that would shake the bed. This was repeated several times, and I began to think of the unfortunate Tom who was "fitified." Mart seemed on the verge of a fit himself, and I waited apprehensively for each snorting ...
— A Knight of the Cumberland • John Fox Jr.
... was a good-tempered woman, long past the grand climacteric, and strongly attached to Forster, with whom she had resided many years. But, like all women, whether married or single, who have the responsibility of a household, she would have her own way; and scolded her master with as little ceremony as if she had been ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... Ann's church on the hill lie the bones of a remarkable man who died at Lewes (in the tenth climacteric) in 1613—no less a person than Thomas Twyne, M.D. In addition to the principles of physic he "comprehended earthquakes" and wrote a book about them. He also wrote a survey of the world. I quote Horsfield's translation of the ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... thirtieth birthday in sight, and girlhood gone, is approaching a climacteric in her career. Flaubert has named twenty-nine as the eventful year in the life of woman, and thirty-three for men. Every normal woman craves love and tenderness—these are her God-given right. If they have not come to her by the time the bloom is fading from ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... first battle of the Somme, launched some days past, was at its very climacteric. The casualties had been and were terrible. Even at this moment of night the fury of the attack was not relaxed. All through the day reports, exasperating in their brevity, had been streaming into Paris, ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... the egg which passes from the ovary to the uterus is not fertilized, it is excreted, the uterus goes through another monthly cycle of preparation for the period of intra-maternal environment, and so on indefinitely until the climacteric. ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... though small, were somewhat gaudily painted and furnished, and his dining-room was decorated a la Turque. The party consisted-first, of a rich epicier, a widower, Monsieur Goupille by name, an eminent man in the Faubourg; he was in his grand climacteric, but still belhomme; wore a very well-made peruque of light auburn, with tight pantaloons, which contained a pair of very respectable calves; and his white neckcloth and his large gill were washed and got up with especial care. Next to Monsieur Goupille sat a ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... my great Climacteric, and am naturally a Man of a meek Temper. About a dozen Years ago I was married, for my Sins, to a young Woman of a good Family, and of an high Spirit; but could not bring her to close with me, before I had entered into a Treaty with ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... all that therein is may have cause to rejoice in the fullness of the year. Above the ground she stores it in drupe and pome and berry, nut and nutlet and achene, and below the ground in rootstock and rhizome, corm and tuber, pumping them full with strokes quick and strong in these grand climacteric days of the summer. All the water which seemed so useless in April, all the rain which seemed so superfluous and so dreary in May and June, has been used. Not a drop of it was wasted. Its office was to feed life, to dissolve the substances in the rocks and the soils ...
— Some Summer Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... the innocence and ignorance of Swedenborg's speculations are proof in themselves that his entire life was absolutely above reproach. Swedenborg's bridal-chamber is the dream of a school-girl, presented by a scientific analyst, a man well past his grand climacteric, who imagined that the perpetuation of sexual ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... given its name to that brilliant generation of poets, novelists, painters and philosophers which, as Theophile Gautier says with just pride, "will make its mark on the future and be spoken of as one of the climacteric epochs of the human mind." The revolution of July inspired Delacroix with one of his most interesting pictures. Le 28 Juillet is the only one of his works in which he depicts modern life, and was a striking refutation to those who complained that modern costume is too ugly ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... intelligent of his auditors. He continued Dean of St Paul's till his death, which took place in 1631, when he was approaching sixty. He died of consumption, a disease which seldom cuts down a man so near his grand climacteric. ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... Athens, in the close of this brilliant period of Greek philosophy, now assumes an aspect of deeper interest and profounder significance. It was a grand climacteric in the life of humanity—an epoch in the moral and religious history of the world. It marked the consummation of a periodic dispensation, and it opened a new era in that wonderful progression through which an overruling ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... herself a friend to the ceremonial of former times, when a lover might have sighed seven years at his mistress's feet before he was allowed the liberty of kissing her hand. 'Tis true Mrs. Margery was now about her grand climacteric; no matter: that is just the age when we expect to grow younger. But I verily believe there was nothing in the report; the curate's connection was only that of a genealogist; for in that character he was no way inferior to Mrs. Margery herself. He ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... chair, awaiting his coming in the cool of the soft spring evening, the events of the past few months seemed very far away and unreal, almost as though they might have been a dream born of her fever. She could scarcely believe that she had ever left Limasito; the climacteric weeks in New York, the trip to Topaz Gulch and the later scene in Jim Baggott's hotel had alike faded into a vague, nebulous shadow without substance or coherence, and she herself seemed drifting. ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... power of the air have had time and chance of fighting their hardest against it. It is the turn which a man takes about the age of forty or five-and-forty that parts him off among the sheep on the right hand or the poor goats on the left. This is the time of the grand moral climacteric; when genial unvarnished selfishness, or coarse and ungenial cynicism, or querulous despondency, finally chokes out the generous resolve of a fancied strength which had not yet been tried in the burning ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 3 (of 3) - Essay 2: The Death of Mr Mill - Essay 3: Mr Mill's Autobiography • John Morley
... intoxicated with joy during his first days in Florence. He was charmed by the soft lines of the Tuscan hills and the beauty of the Tuscan speech. Lorenzo the Magnificent had been ruling Florence for many years and was then at the climacteric of his fame. Under his sway everything appeared to prosper. Enemies had been imprisoned or banished, and factions had ceased to distract the city. Lorenzo's shameless licentiousness was condoned by reason of his brilliancy, his patronage ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... his eyes; he was well-nigh speechless but beat time with an intensity that carried his men along like chips in a high surf. The free-fantasia of the poem was reached, and, roaring, the music neared its climacteric point. "Now," whispered Pobloff, stooping, "when the pianissimo begins I shall watch for the Abysm." As the wind sweepingly rushes to a howling apex so came the propulsive crash of the climax. The tone rapidly subsided ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... Catholic tenet of the Assumption of the Virgin, we have limited our researches to the writers who lived before the Nicene Council. That Council has always been considered a cardinal point,—a sort of climacteric in the history of the early Church. It was the first Council to which all the bishops of Christendom were summoned; and the influence of its decrees is felt beneficially in the Catholic Church to this very day. In fixing upon this Council as our present boundary line, I was influenced by a conviction, ...
— Primitive Christian Worship • James Endell Tyler
... a party of guests. His apartments, though small, were somewhat gaudily painted and furnished, and his dining-room was decorated a la Turque. The party consisted-first, of a rich epicier, a widower, Monsieur Goupille by name, an eminent man in the Faubourg; he was in his grand climacteric, but still belhomme; wore a very well-made peruque of light auburn, with tight pantaloons, which contained a pair of very respectable calves; and his white neckcloth and his large gill were washed and got up with especial care. Next to Monsieur ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... effective. The secondary sexual characteristics have been already established and persist. It occasionally occurs that certain mental effects are produced. In women these resemble, generally speaking, those occurring at the climacteric. In both sexes, however, mental ...
— Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders • W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Patterson, C.E. Matthews
... Frenchman, and such sentiment was quite in his way. The dialogue, whether it produce this effect on many readers or not, is very pleasant reading: and when we remember that the author wrote it when he was exactly in his grand climacteric, and addressed it to his friend Atticus, who was within a year of the same age, we get that element of personal interest which makes all writings of the kind more attractive. The argument in defence of the paradox that it is a good thing to grow old, proceeds upon the ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... stupendous a moment that it would quickly have become awkward and anti-climacteric but for ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... Love, The Channing, W.H., Ode inscribed to Character Chartist's Complaint, The Circles Climacteric Compensation Concord Hymn Concord, Ode Sung in the Town Hall, July ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... also called the climacteric, and in common language "change of life," is the period at which woman ceases to menstruate. The average age at which this occurs is about forty-eight. But while some women continue to menstruate up to the age of fifty, fifty-two, and even fifty-five, ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... when he could have heard a specimen of Virgil's Eclogues, must have been near his grand climacteric; besides that, his virtues and talents had long been conspicuous, and were past the state of hope. It is probable, therefore, that altera referred to some third person, spoken of immediately before, as one who promised to do ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... not reached its grand climacteric; yet its earliest beginnings already seem centuries behind its present performances. The details of its gradual yet rapid improvement are of too technical a nature to find a place in these pages. Suffice it to say that the "dry-plate" process, with which such wonderful ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... revealed. Caliban is no more helpless here than other men. His failure in theology is a picture of the failure of all men. God must show himself at Sinais and at Calvarys, at cross and grave and resurrection and ascension; must pass from the disclosure of his being the "I Am" to those climacteric moments of the world when he discovered to us that he was the "I am Love" and the "I am the Resurrection and the Life." ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... order of development' has not destined the peoples of the earth to the melancholy fate of China. The climacteric of the present stage of progress is rapidly approaching, is even now touching with its finger the startled nations. When it shall have passed, the world will enter upon the third and final stage of civil progress, in which the organized power, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... foreshadowed political storm was brewing. At first a cloud no larger than a man's hand, it matured swiftly in the late months of 1895, and by the spring of 1896 it had become portentous and was ready to burst. With the climacteric nomination of the "Apostle of Free Silver" for President of the United States, which followed in July, a chill settled down over the conservative and financial elements of the country. What Cowperwood had wisely proceeded to do months before, others less far-seeing, from Maine to California and from ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... appetite, and we did due execution on the lamb. The clerk, fixing his eyes steadily on the piece he had singled out, tucked up his sleeves, as for a surgical operation, and bone after bone was picked, and thrown over the rock; and when all were satisfied, the clerk was evidently at the climacteric of his powers of mastication. After reposing a ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... sense in which the statement that no literary training is required by the student of photoplay writing is true. Provided he is gifted with an imaginative mind and the native ability to see how an idea or a plot-germ would evolve itself into a climacteric and coherent story, and provided he has the dramatic sense, he can actually learn the rules of construction and produce salable photoplays even if he has by no means the literary ability to write a salable short-story. But he must be a person ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... intelligent among them looked gratified, for the painless achievement of fresh knowledge is a pleasant thing. Madame Zattiany went on patiently: "These glands in my case had undergone a natural process of exhaustion. In women the slower functioning of the endocrines is coincident with the climacteric, as they have been dependent for stimulation upon certain ovarian cells. The idea involved is that the stimulation of these exhausted cells would cause the other glands to function once more at full strength and a certain rejuvenation ensue as a matter of course; unless, ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... another day like the others, with nothing that hinted at a climacteric which would make the affairs of the mill office of the Morrisons either better ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... this double life is that human serenity which furnishes so vivid a contrast to the lack of reason in the brutes. Reason has won to a wonderful extent the mastery over the animal nature. The climacteric stage of the mere exercise of reason is displayed in Stoicism, an ethical system which aims primarily not at virtue but at happiness, although this theory inculcates that happiness can be attained only through "ataraxia" (inward ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... all that good does not amount to what builders call half-repairs, and only keeps up the shattered fabric a little longer than it would have stood without them; but take my word for it, it will stand but a very little while longer. I am now in my grand climacteric, and shall not complete it. Fontenelle's last words at a hundred and three were, Je souffre d'etre. deaf and infirm as I am, I can with truth say the same thing at sixty-three. In my mind it is only ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... merely a party crisis but a national climacteric. Never did a great people enter upon a period of trial and choice with more sincere and disinterested desire to know the truth and to do justice in their generation. ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... Chatillon, ranking next to him. It was my ill-fortune, however, to be equally unknown to all three leaders, and as the month of December which saw me thus miserably straitened saw me reach the age of forty, which I regard, differing in that from many, as the grand climacteric of a man's life, it will be believed that I had need of all the courage which religion and a campaigner's ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... those who feel that female dignity is compromised by it, I have here omitted a woman's flippant overestimate of the number of women in London society who suffer from nervous disorders at the climacteric ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... another on his breeches, a third praised his horse, a fourth abused the fire-engine, and a fifth inquired where he got his glazed hat. He had an answer for them all, and a nod or a wink for every pretty maid that showed at the windows; for though past the grand climacteric, he still has a spice of the devil in him—and, as he says, "there is no harm in looking." The "Red Lion" at Smitham Bottom was the rendezvous of the day. It is a small inn on the Brighton road, some three or four miles below Croydon. On the left of the road stands the inn, on the right is a small ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... gratification. Actuated by a noble self-abnegation, she derives a melancholy pleasure from the knowledge that she has utterly given up all she had formerly so zealously guarded, and she feels that her love has reached its grand climacteric when she abandons herself, without redemption, to the idol she has set up in the highest place in her soul. This heroic martyrdom is one of the recognizable causes of the immorality that insidiously permeates our ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... wisdom, I would at least preserve something of the stiff and peremptory dignity of age. These gentlemen deal in regeneration: but at any price I should hardly yield my rigid fibres to be regenerated by them,—nor begin, in my grand climacteric, to squall in their new accents, or to stammer, in my second cradle, the elemental sounds of their barbarous metaphysics.[128] Si isti mihi largiantur ut repuerascam, et in eorum ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... of this 'grand climacteric' are often marked. Not unfrequently the woman becomes more masculine in thought and habit, as has been admirably described by Dr. Tilt:—'There are almost always while the change is progressing various forms of nervous irritability and some amount of confusion ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... conscious that the senator from Fraser had changed in the years that had passed since the beginning of their acquaintance. Bassett had outwardly altered little as he crossed the watershed of middle life; but it seemed to Dan that the ill-temper he had manifested in the Thatcher affair had marked a climacteric. The self-control and restraint that had so impressed him at first had visibly diminished. What Harwood had taken for steel seemed to him now only iron after all—and ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... living being pursues its own peculiar purposes. They co-operate, according to the degree of their development, in collective or tribal purposes, larger ends thus enveloping lesser ones, until an absolutely single, final and climacteric purpose subserved by all things without exception might conceivably be reached. It is needless to say that the appearances conflict with such a view. Any resultant, as I said in my third lecture, MAY have been purposed in advance, but none of the results ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... straddle who has just sworn by his infernal den. The defence will not be long against such vice, such flames, such red-hot nether energy. And in the fourth cut, to be sure, he has leaped bodily upon his victim, sped by foot and pinion, and roaring as he leaps. The fifth shows the climacteric of the battle; Christian has reached nimbly out and got his sword, and dealt that deadly home-thrust, the fiend still stretched upon him, but "giving back, as one that had received his mortal wound." The raised head, the bellowing mouth, the paw clapped upon the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... London had been obtained through the Earl of Oxford, a distant cousin of her husband, in whose household her son Walter had long before taken unwholesome lessons in fashion and extravagance. The Earl, now in his grand climacteric, had outlived his youthful frivolity, and though he had become a hard and austere man, was yet willing to do a kindness to his kinsman's widow by engaging a house for her, and offering for her grandson ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... of Rockland, was a shrewd old man, who looked pretty keenly into his patients through his spectacles, and pretty widely at men, women, and things in general over them. Sixty-three years old,—just the year of the grand climacteric. A bald crown, as every doctor should have. A consulting practitioner's mouth; that is, movable round the corners while the case is under examination, but both corners well drawn down and kept ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... give enthusiasm over earthly progress serious pause. This earth, once uninhabitable, will be uninhabitable again. If not by wholesale catastrophe, then by the slow wearing down of the sun's heat, already passed its climacteric, this planet, the transient theatre of the human drama, will be no longer the scene of man's activity, but as cold as the moon, or as hot as colliding stars in heaven, will be able to sustain human life ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... I will not speak of you, his feeble and unhappy father; I will not speak of us, his mourning friends. Russia has lost her beloved, her national poet. She has lost him at the very moment when his powers had reached their maturity, lost him when he had reached that climacteric—that point at which our intellect, bidding farewell to the fervid, and sometimes irregular force of youth agitated by genius, devotes itself to more tranquil, more orderly powers of riper manhood, fresh as the first period, and if less tempestuous, yet certainly more creative. What Russian ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... months of 1888. The last of all contains a reference to Robert Elsmere. Five days later, on April 15, a sudden exertion, it seems, brought on the fatal attack, and he died. He had outlived his grand climacteric of sixty-three (which he had thought would be "the end as well as the climax") by two ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... picking up stories and anecdotes of a certain kind. He believed in presentiments, predictions, omens, meetings, lucky and unlucky days, in the persecution and benevolence of destiny, in the mysterious significance of life, in fact. He even believed in certain "climacteric" years which someone had mentioned in his presence and the meaning of which he did not himself very well understand. "Fatal" men of the true stamp ought not to betray such beliefs: they ought to inspire ...
— Knock, Knock, Knock and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... the less had the one drunk no brandy, nor the other any laudanum. A man must submit to the conditions of humanity, and not quarrel with a cure as incomplete, because in his climacteric year of sixty-three, he cannot recover, entirely, the vivacities of thirty- five. If, by dipping seven times in Jordan, he had cleansed his whole leprosy of intemperance; if, by going down into Bethesda, he were able to mount again upon the pinions of his ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... to so terrible a leaping-place in the dark, for more perhaps than life or death. At last, the great act, the critical moment itself comes, easily, almost unconsciously. Another motion of the clock, and our fatal line—the "great climacteric point"—has been passed, which changes ourselves or our lives. In one quarter of an hour, under a sudden, uncontrollable impulse, hardly weighing what he did, almost as a matter of course and as lightly as one hires a bed for one's night's rest on a journey, Marius had taken upon himself all ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... that child-voice passed, and it was a new music and a new joy. I can give the reader no notion of it, because there is not in nature anything with which I can compare it. The blackcap has a climacteric note, just before his song collapses and dies, so full of pathos and tenderness that often, when I had been sitting on a gate in Wilderness Road, it had affected me more deeply than any human words. But here was a note sweet and soft as that, and yet ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... terrible master; and yet we are always copying it. Does a man from real conviction of heart forsake his vices? The position is not to be allowed. No; his vices have forsaken him. Does a pure virgin fear God, and say her prayers? She is in her climacteric? Does humility clothe and educate the unknown orphan? Poverty, thou hast no genealogies. See! is he not the father of the child?" In another sermon he launches out into quaintly contemptuous criticism of a religious movement which he was certainly the ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... not be fully accepted by the author himself, still only thirty-eight, and so Kareno steps down into the respectable and honoured sloth of age only to be succeeded, by another hero who has not yet passed the climacteric twenty-ninth year. Even Telegraph-Rolandsen in "Dreamers" retains the youthful glow and charm and irresponsibility that used to be thought inseparable from the true ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... Brent disarm? His heart can soft Guadagni warm? Or scenes with sweet delusion charm The climacteric eye? ...
— Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. - during the last twenty years of his life • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... because of this young girl with the mocking laugh, he was losing the climacteric expression of the three- weeks' campaign, his displeasure grew. Within him was an undefined thought vibration akin to surprise, caused by the serenity of the hushed sky. Was it not incongruous that the heavens should ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... there would still, as is known to medical men, come a time when the particles of the body would feel the hereditary tendency to do that which leads inevitably to dissolution, and would obey it. It must be obvious to any reflecting man that, if by any procedure this critical climacteric could be once thoroughly passed over, the subsequent danger of "Death" would be proportionally less as the years progressed. Now this, which no ordinary and unprepared mind and body can do, is possible sometimes for the will and the frame of one who has been specially prepared. There ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... vigor and lowered mood. In youth the state of the organs brings a state of well feeling; in old age there is a constant feeling of a low balance of energy and mood, and the person is always on the verge of unpleasant feeling. In the great change periods of life—at puberty and the climacteric (or the menopause)—the sudden change in the activity of the sex organs may produce great alterations[2] in the coenaesthesia and therefore in the energy ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... in the sixty-third, or what is called the grand climacteric year of life;—had the blessing to retain the use of all his senses to the last; and as death had long before assailed, though not totally vanquished him, he was too much decayed by continual wastings, to feel any of those pangs, ...
— Life's Progress Through The Passions - Or, The Adventures of Natura • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... about the streets of London in all but the utter darkness of a twinkling oil lamp, under the protection of watchmen in their grand climacteric, and exposed to every species of ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... 63rd year of a man's life, and the average limit of it; a climacteric being every seven years of one's ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... cautious in exercising the right of censorship, which is supposed to be acquired by men arrived at, or approaching, the mysterious period of life, when the numbers of seven and nine multiplied into each other, form what sages have termed the Grand Climacteric. ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... treated the Doctor to a cup of such tea as bachelors sometimes keep hid away in mysterious caddies. He presently began asking certain questions about the grand climacteric, which eventful period of life he was fast approaching. Then he discoursed of medicine, ancient and modern, tasking the Doctor's knowledge not a little, and evincing a good deal of acquaintance with old ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... him. He may have been sorely tempted to reply, but I am apt to believe that the rumors that reached him from abroad and at home did not then affect him as they might have done earlier. He was at his grand climacteric, he had passed his sixty-third year, his temper was less hasty than it had been in his youth, and his nerves had not yet received the severe strain from whose effects he suffered during the ...
— Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works • Edward Singleton Holden
... Reveries, which are mellow with the golden calm of his discovered peace, he tells how, having reached the climacteric which he had set at forty years, he went apart into the solitude of the Ermitage to inquire into the configuration of his own soul, and to fix once for all his opinions and his principles. In the exquisite third Reverie two phrases occur continually. His purpose was 'to find firm ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry |
