"Middle-age" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in the small anteroom. The outer door bore no legend other than the room number, and the inner door was blank altogether. Muldoon made a quick appraisal of those waiting. Three were obviously past middle-age, the fourth about Muldoon's age. The inner door opened and Muldoon looked up. A tall man came out first, a man in his early sixties, perhaps. Immediately behind him came a slightly shorter man, but ...
— Lease to Doomsday • Lee Archer
... young and naive, with some girl's freshness. But she did not want any more the fight, the battle, the control, as he, in his incontinence, still did. She was so natural, and he was ugly, unnatural, in his inability to yield place. How hideous, this greedy middle-age, which must stand in the way of life, like ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... or municipal building, is of the quaintest and most picturesque Middle-Age architecture. It has a massive portico and steps, before it, heavily balustraded, and adorned with life-sized rusty iron knights in complete armor. The clock-face on the front of the building is very large ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... ever. Then Addie married. She was nearly if not quite forty years old, and neither her brother nor sister-in-law expected such an event. She was sallow, thin, and rather querulous in temperament. Very likely Addie felt that marriage could not make her lot worse, and as middle-age threatened, she accepted the defeat of her ambitions and in the spirit of better-late-than-never struck out for herself in the race for personal happiness, throwing over ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... wide veranda and came down to meet them, a tall, smooth-faced man of young middle-age, evidently on most intimate terms with the Governor and the Major. While expressing his pleasure in being privileged to entertain Terry, he bent upon him the searching look of appraisal which is instinctive in the Orient, where the masses ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... acquiescence in his own nature, would keep him beside her, and to-night would see them as affianced lovers. It would be a pity to have let one's new-found soul go; but, after all, it was so very new that the pang of parting would soon be over; that was a good point about middle-age, one soon got over pangs, soon ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... and genial, that even his jokes had the air of graceful benedictions. He did not seem to grow old, and he was one of those who never appear to have been very young. He flourished in a perennial maturity, an immortal middle-age. ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... deliberately got rid of for the sake of widening a road. Lament over such a proceeding would be idle enough; Catanzaro is the one progressive town of Calabria, and has learnt too thoroughly the spirit of the time to suffer a blocking of its highway by middle-age obstructions. ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... has reached middle-age he generally feels with tenfold force the truth of those "sayings of the wise" which he learned in his early years, and has cause to regret, as well as wonder, that he had not all along followed their wholesome ...
— Book of Wise Sayings - Selected Largely from Eastern Sources • W. A. Clouston
... ancestors and successors—could not fail to be applied to any subject that at all lent itself to such treatment. But, on the other hand, this division of the romances of antiquity does not exhibit the more fertile, the more inventive, the more poetical, and generally the nobler traits of Middle-Age literature. As will have been noted, there was little invention in the later versions, the Callisthenic fictions and the Iter ad Paradisum being, with a few Oriental accretions, almost slavishly relied upon for furnishing out the main story, though the "Foray of Gaza," ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... things for a man to guard against: The lusts of the flesh in early years, The spirit of combativeness in middle-age, And ambition as the years go on. There are three things to command your reverence: The ordinances of Heaven, Great men, and the words of the sages. There are three times three things to be remembered: To be clear in vision, Quick in hearing, ...
— My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard • Elizabeth Cooper
... his brain was curiously clear and swift. He'd have no more wild evenings, he realized. He admitted that he would regret them. A little grimly he perceived that this had been his last despairing fling before the paralyzed contentment of middle-age. Well, and he grinned impishly, "it was one doggone good party while it lasted!" And—how much was the operation going to cost? "I ought to have fought that out with Dilling. But no, damn it, I don't care how much ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... there only for a single day, I did not think it best to submit in all points to the cold water treatment; neither did SEATSFIELD, for I noticed that he mixed two table-spoonfuls of gin with every gill of cold water. SEATSFIELD is a man of about middle-age, with a penetrating eye, and rather a good form, though not unusually muscular. His face bears a remarkable resemblance to the pictures of NUMA POMPILIUS; the benign smile of each is the same. His chin is round and full, although partially concealed by ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... a woman of middle-age, with well-formed features of the type usually found where perspicacity is the chief quality enthroned within. At moments she seemed to be regarding issues from a Nebo denied to others around. She had something of an estranged mien; the solitude exhaled from the heath was concentrated ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... lights and shadows. The ghostly wavings of those pale curtains. Smell the potpourri and spices. Think of the ancestor worship. Listen to the protesting wind and rain. See the mysterious treasure you hold in your hand. And then ask me what middle-age and the clerical profession have to do with all this! Why, nothing, just precisely nothing, nothing in the whole world. That's the point of my argument. They'd ruin the sentiment, blight the romance, hopelessly ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... their bloody hatchets in their hands, he threw himself into the sea through a window which was near him, and was drowned, without it being in the power of the deponent to assist or take him up; * * * that a short time after killing Aranda, they brought upon deck his german-cousin, of middle-age, Don Francisco Masa, of Mendoza, and the young Don Joaquin, Marques de Aramboalaza, then lately from Spain, with his Spanish servant Ponce, and the three young clerks of Aranda, Jose Mozairi Lorenzo Bargas, ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... Now, for the first time in his life impassioned, he felt something mysterious and unwelcome to him begin to mingle with his desire. Above all, life without her meant dullness, lack of vitality, the swift onset of middle-age. He saw this with shrinking. He walked wearily, looking older than he was ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... opinions concerning middle-age common to youth, but she was fond of Sally and set her heart ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... and then a lighter moment spent in analytical consideration of the extra-mural decorations of St. Mark's. The world buzzed along after its own fashion, not disturbing him, and his absorptions permitted only a faint consciousness of the despair of his relatives regarding his mind. Arrived at middle-age, and a little more, he found himself alone in the world (though, for that matter, he had always been alone and never of the world), and there was plenty of money for him with various bankers who appeared to know about looking ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... topside, but an even pleasanter night below, at least in our part of the ship below. A few of us were gathered in the flag office, where Dalton, the flag yeoman, sometimes allowed us to call when his admiral was ashore. Getting on toward middle-age was Dalton, with a head of gray-flecked hair and an old-time school-master's face. ...
— Wide Courses • James Brendan Connolly
... should," he assured her. "Believe me, there isn't such an obstinate person in the world as the man of early middle-age who suddenly discovers the woman ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... any untidy way at the edges, or anything dull like that. Could you call a place dull which was first heard of historically in connection with a reward for killing wolves? There's a dear old town not far from the ferry. In its sedate middle-age it was a great whaling place, and is still crammed full of sea captains' descendants who are, in their turn, crammed full of fascinating stories of old days of great adventure, just as their serene-looking, aged houses ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... any necromancy at work upon his daughter. He smoked his pipe, made notes in his field-book, directing an occasional remark toward his apprentice, enjoying in his tranquil, middle-age way the beauty ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... me. You're reminding me that I'm a trifle passe myself and ought to marry something sere and yellow. But I tell you I don't feel any older than twenty-five—never have, it's my affliction—while you've never been younger than forty in all your life. It's you who ought to marry middle-age"—and he grimaced ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... is that the Russia of our fathers, of our childhood, of our middle-age; the testamentary Russia of Peter the Great—who imagined that all the nations were delivered into the hand of Tsardom—can do nothing. It can do nothing because it does not exist. It has vanished ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... playing fields becomes the dunce of the office. Other men go on playing till middle-age robs them of their physical powers. At the end the whole thing is revealed as vanity. Play tennis or golf once a day and you may be famous; play it three times a day and you will be in danger of being thought a ...
— Success (Second Edition) • Max Aitken Beaverbrook
... time I and Jeb Seaton, my rear-rank man, have hung out his washing, for the smell of the wet linen seemed to take us both straight home as nothing else could do. I have often wondered whether that good man and his wife are still living, though I think it hardly likely, for they were of a hale middle-age at the time. Jim would come with us too, sometimes, and would sit with us smoking in the big Flemish kitchen, but he was a different Jim now to the old one. He had always had a hard touch in him, but now his trouble seemed to have turned ...
— The Great Shadow and Other Napoleonic Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... received with great applause and Miss Burney wrote other books, but they are without importance. Her success won her the friendship of Dr. Johnson and the position of one of the Queen's waiting women, a sort of gilded slavery which she endured for five years. She was married in middle-age to a French emigrant officer, Monsieur D'Arblay, and lived in France and England until the age of nearly ninety, latterly an inactive but much respected figure among the writers ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... examine the lives of poets, we too often see how their inspiration flagged and failed. Milton indeed wrote his noblest verse in middle-age, after a life immersed in affairs. Wordsworth went on writing to the end, but all his best poetry was written in about five early years. Tennyson went on to a patriarchal age, but there is little of his later work that bears comparison with what he wrote before he was forty. ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... and needed no excuse. Though many of the men were physically powerful, few of them could boast of any physical comeliness. Their strength had been bought dear, at the cost of heavy labour begun too early in life, so that before middle-age they were bent in the back, or gone wrong at the knees, and their walk (some of them walked miles every day to their work) was a long shambling stride, fast enough, but badly wanting in suggestiveness of personal pride. Seeing them casually in their heavy and uncleanly clothes, no one would ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... quiet waterway they overhang a promenade historique of which the lesson, however often we read it, gives, in the depth of its interest, an incomparable dignity to Venice. We read it in the Romanesque arches, crooked to-day in their very curves, of the early middle-age, in the exquisite individual Gothic of the splendid time, and in the cornices and columns of a decadence almost as proud. These things at present are almost equally touching in their good faith; they have each in their degree so effectually parted with their pride. They have lived on as they ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... shown sufficient spirit to lose an eye during a sporting absence of three nights and days, Violet was not again permitted enough freedom of action to repeat this disloyalty; though, now, in his advanced middle-age, he had been fed to such a state that he seldom cared to move, other than by a slow, sneering wavement of the tail when friendly words were addressed to him; and consequently, as he seemed beyond all capacity or desire to run away, or to run ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... turned with the greatest shrinking. She had a sense of deeper empoverishment—of an inner destitution compared to which outward conditions dwindled into insignificance. It was indeed miserable to be poor—to look forward to a shabby, anxious middle-age, leading by dreary degrees of economy and self-denial to gradual absorption in the dingy communal existence of the boarding-house. But there was something more miserable still—it was the clutch of solitude ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... her youth vanish, her freshness disappear, her hopes die, and now she felt her flaming middle-age slipping away from her. No wonder that with her admirably dressed, abundant hair, thickly sprinkled with white threads and adding to her elegant aspect the piquant distinction of a powdered coiffure—no wonder, I say, that she clung desperately to her last infatuation for that graceless young ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... strongly indeed to the original type when robbed by the gypsies, for they turned out all together, hunted them down, and, having secured the sorceress, burned her alive at the stake. And thus in a single crime and its punishment we have curiously combined a world-old Oriental offense, an European Middle-Age penalty for witchcraft, and the fierce torture of ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... Horvendile reflected, had been within this hour sedately dining with his wife,—neither of them eating with the zest and vigor of their first youth, perhaps, but sharing amicably the more moderate refreshment which middle-age requires,—without being at any particular pains to conceal the fact from anybody. Here was then, after all, the strong and sure salvation of Philistia, in this quiet, unassuming common-sense, which dealt with the facts ...
— Taboo - A Legend Retold from the Dirghic of Saevius Nicanor, with - Prolegomena, Notes, and a Preliminary Memoir • James Branch Cabell
... the town, you find here and there bits of middle-age architecture, which have escaped ruin; here a door, there a window, of graceful design, built around with the rough masonwork for which Segni is noted in later days; but the greater number of the houses are constructed in the rudest manner, indicating the poverty and ignorance of the majority ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... had a curious twinge of conscience as I parted from Lady Osprey. Either a first intimation of middle-age or my inexperience in romantic affairs was to blame, but I felt a very distinct objection to the prospect of invading this good lady's premises from the garden door. I motored up to the pavilion, ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... search for Reality, her relations with her mother, father and three brothers, and her final passage from the bondage of infancy, the conflicts of childhood and adolescence, the disenchantments (and other drawbacks) of maturity, to the freedom, peace and happiness of middle-age. ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... yet as that name was mentioned. Henry dominated the imagination of his subjects to an extraordinary degree, no less in his heavy middle-age than in the magnificent strength ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... The boy became pathetic to him; behind his dapper morning clothes, his intricate studs and fobs and rings, his reedy self-confidence, the physician saw the faint, grisly shadow of a sickly middle-age, a warped and ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... old times again at Bigorre, and many spots in the vicinity are rife with Middle-Age incidents of robbing and righting. This region was the plague-spot of the country for its freebooting fortresses,—Lourdes, Mauvoisin, Trigalet, with their adventurers always ready for a fracas,—the strongholds, as has been said, ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... toiling from morning till night for her eighty pounds a year; Juliana, painful and persistent, growing into middle-age without a hope, Juliana was an incarnate reproach, a perpetual monument to the folly of Tollington Moon. ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair
... these islets or rocks of the Sirens, barren and desolate, with a few ruins of the Roman time and remains of the Middle-Age prisons of the doges of Amalfi; but I do not care to dissipate any illusions by going to them. I remember how the Sirens sat on flowery meads by the shore and sang, and are vulgarly supposed to have allured passing mariners to a life of ignoble pleasure, and then let them ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... diluted with some of the worst, flowed comfortably in Mrs. Spencer's veins, it was impossible even for her relatives to deny that she could be at times decidedly vulgar. Having been a conspicuous belle and beauty of a bold and dashing type in her youth, she now devoted her middle-age to the enjoyment of those pleasures which she had formerly sacrificed to the preservation of her figure and her complexion. Though she still dyed her somewhat damaged hair, and strenuously pinched in her widening waist, she had ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... that bugbear of bufferish Middle-Age! Swift "scurry-funging" may do for the young, The "hey-diddle-diddle, the Cat-and-the-fiddle" age. "Over the moon" I myself once had sprung, Thirty years syne, in sheer fervour athletical— Now, like the dog, I would laugh, and look on. Once, with sheer "drive," I'd ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 8, 1892 • Various
... Their sites were in the river valleys and in the forests (R. 69), and the monks became the pioneers in clearing the land and preparing the way for agriculture and civilization. Not infrequently a swamp was taken and drained. The Middle-Age period was essentially a period of settlement of the land and of agricultural development, and the monks lived on the land and among a people just passing through the earliest stages of settled and civilized life. In a way ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... felt out of place socially. His natural dignity and detachment of mind were alike too strong for that; but he had arrived at the conclusion that you must have learned the rudiments of the art of amusement in early youth if you are to practise it with satisfaction to yourself in middle-age. And he very certainly had not learned the rudiments—not, anyhow, according to the English fashion. He had been aware, during these social excursions, that he was a good deal stared at and even commented on. At first he supposed this arose from some peculiarity of his dress or manner. Then he understood ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... children, though she adored them—at least, sporadically. But her burden tired her patience out. Timothy Finn's income had not increased in proportion to his family. He was now in his young manhood, at the height of his earning capacity, and early middle-age might ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... is perhaps only like the majority of men' (she says of an acquaintance). 'Certainly those men who lead a gay life in their youth, and arrive at middle-age with feelings blunted and passions exhausted, can have but one aim in marriage—the selfish advancement of their interest. Hard to think that such men take as wives—as second-selves—women young, modest, sincere, pure in heart and life, with feelings all fresh and emotions all unworn, and bind ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... opportunities of seeing and knowing more of her personally. Her features are delicate, and have been very handsome; and in manner she is very calm, and quiet, and dignified. She looks all that you would expect from what I have told you. The briskness of youth, the sedate firmness of middle-age, have years since given place, as you will see with some pain, to the feebleness produced by ill health and mental suffering—for she mourned grievously after those whom she had lost! Oh! how she dotes upon her surviving son and ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... this, had lost consciousness of external sights and sounds. He could not have told any one when it was that the two worlds had parted company. For many many years he had been conscious of both existences, but during his youth and middle-age they had seemed to mingle and go along together. He had believed in both equally and had been a citizen of both. Then gradually, as time passed, he had seemed to have less and less hold upon the actual physical world. He saw it suddenly with darkened vision; his wife and daughter, ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... you, no! He was past middle-age. Small, thin man, with a smooth face; and the other was a ...
— Raftmates - A Story of the Great River • Kirk Munroe
... had pictured somewhat sentimentally the joy of the moment when he should take her in his arms and receive her first filial kiss. Everything in him that egotistically craved for rest, stability, a comfortably organized middle-age, all the home-building instincts of the man who has sufficiently wooed and wandered, combined to throw a charm about the figure of the child who might—who should—have been his. Effie came to him trailing the cloud ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... perhaps even to the existence, of society. If such frenzies were, unhappily, to burst out among mankind at present, civilized nations might transport their energumeni to distant possessions; but the middle-age magistrates had no facilities of that kind: they should deal with the terrible plague by the only means at their disposal; and these were, either to let the madness wear itself out, or to repress it by the rope and faggot. If they had adopted the former course, the epidemic would probably ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... benefited only to a limited extent under the will of his father, he is not generally reputed to be wealthy, but he is always extravagant. Yet he manages to steer clear of the painful consequences of writs with some astuteness. In middle-age he becomes obese, and cannot go the pace as formerly. His friends therefore abandon him, and he dies before he is fifty, in reduced circumstances, of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 22nd, 1890 • Various
... came back. He had no knack for business, no head for figures, no dimmest insight into the mysteries of commerce. He wanted to travel and write—those were his inmost longings. And as the years dragged on, and he neared middle-age without making any more money, or acquiring any firmer health, a sick despair possessed him. He tried writing, but he always came home from the office so tired that his brain could not work. For half the ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... floor. Yet this third person stands there with his attentive face, and his hat and stick in his hands, and his hands behind him, a composed and quiet listener. He is a stoutly built, steady-looking, sharp-eyed man in black, of about the middle-age. Except that he looks at Mr. Snagsby as if he were going to take his portrait, there is nothing remarkable about him at first sight but his ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... entrance of a short, thick-set woman, considerably past middle-age—evidently a privileged old servant. There was no mistaking her origin. She was a peasant of Picardy, faithful, honest, good-natured, and strong as an ox. She had been in the service of De Roberval's family all her life; and once, by her courage and ...
— Marguerite De Roberval - A Romance of the Days of Jacques Cartier • T. G. Marquis
... been very liberal to them of hair, as you may see by the following specimen. Fancy these heads and beards under all sorts of caps—Chinese caps, Mandarin caps, Greek skull-caps, English jockey-caps, Russian or Kuzzilbash caps, Middle-age caps (such as are called, in heraldry, caps of maintenance), Spanish nets, and striped worsted nightcaps. Fancy all the jackets you have ever seen, and you have before you, as well as pen can describe, the costumes of ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... has said, on account of its incompleteness. In tracing the subject through history, DR. MAITLAND would no doubt mention the "[Greek: Omphalopsuchoi], or Umbilicani," of the fourteenth century, whose practices make a page (609.) of Waddington's History of the Church read like a sketch of Middle-age Mesmerism, contemptuously given. Also, in Washington Irving's Life of Mahomet, a belief somewhat similar to theirs is stated to have been preached in the seventh century (Bohn's Reprint in Shilling Series, p. 191.) by a certain Moseilma, a ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 73, March 22, 1851 • Various
... to give forth a melancholy sound. The adventurer was touched by this peaceful scene. He envied the lot of the people of this farm, even though he knew their momentary embarrassment. He saw approaching him a woman pale and small in figure, and of middle-age. She was dressed like the peasants of Picardy, but with extreme neatness. Her son accompanied her; her daughter ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... old letter books in the Guildhall—the Black Book, Red Book, and White Book—we see it in storm and calm, observe the vigilant and jealous honesty of the guilds, and become witnesses again to the bloody frays, cruel punishments, and even the petty disputes of the middle-age craftsmen, when Cheapside was one glittering row of goldsmiths' shops, and the very heart of the wealth of London. The records culled so carefully by Mr. Riley are brief but pregnant; they give us facts uncoloured by the historian, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... her mother's gaze the girl's young features looked sadly out of place amid the alcoholic vapours which floated here as no unsuitable medium for wrinkled middle-age; and hardly was a reproachful flash from Tess's dark eyes needed to make her father and mother rise from their seats, hastily finish their ale, and descend the stairs behind her, Mrs Rolliver's caution ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... the able successor of Aristotle; Euclid, the first great geometer; Eratosthenes and Hipparchus, the astronomers; and, latest of ancient scientists, Ptolemy, whose works on astronomy and geography became the text-books of the middle-age schools. ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... dear reader, what profound snobbishness the University System produced, you will allow that it is time to attack some of those feudal middle-age superstitions. If you go down for five shillings to look at the 'College Youths,' you may see one sneaking down the court without a tassel to his cap; another with a gold or silver fringe to his velvet trencher; a third lad with a master's gown and hat, walking ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... window-sill, abstractedly listening. He had been thinking that his ships were burned behind him, and that in middle-age he was starting out to make another camp for himself in the world, all because of the new Seigneur of Pontiac. Time was when he had been successful here, but Louis Racine had changed all that. His hand was ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... but probably four of every five were women. The men had come, apparently, to see and hear Miss Anthony; and when she was done many of them left. It was such an audience as is not often seen. The ladies were generally elderly, the great majority beyond middle-age; they had braved the cold and wind to hear the leader whom they had known and loved for many years, but whom most of them had never seen. Their bright faces framed in silvery hair, with brighter eyes upturned to the speakers, must have been an inspiration to those on the platform; ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... tufts and trails of foliage and blossom, mingling their sweet odours with the fresh scent of the sea. Amid all the glow and delicacy of colour, the crowning perfection of the perfect environment was the Queen-Consort, lovelier in her middle-age than most women in their teens. An exquisite figure of stateliness and dignity, robed in such hues and adorned with such jewels as best suited her statuesque beauty, and attended by ladies of whose more youthful charms she was never envious, having indeed ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... spring-like, too, in their starry fulfillment of love that has been tried and found all-sufficing; another sable-clad figure, but clerically frocked and portly; and the last, a keen-faced, kindly-eyed man approaching middle-age—a man with sandy hair and a mustache just slightly tinged with gray. He might, from his appearance and bearing, have been a great teacher, a great philanthropist, a great statesman. But he was none of these—or ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... how the huge well-fed figure was drawn, and how the coat wrinkled across the back, and how the bourgeois whiskers were indicated. This obscene drawing is matched by many equally odious. Abject domesticity, ignominies of married life, of middle-age, of money-making; the old common jape against the mother-in-law; ill-dressed men with whisky—ill- dressed women with tempers; everything that is underbred and decivilised; abominable weddings: in one drawing a bridegroom ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... substantial woman, a little over middle-age, in old dark clothes and a black straw hat, enters from the corridor. She goes to a cupboard, brings out from it an apron and a Bissell broom. Her movements are slow and imperturbable, as if she had much time before her. Her face is broad and dark, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... into his long beard, and in the door stood his son-in-law, a sturdy man, himself well past middle-age, with a face that was an index of hardihood, shrewdness, and the gift for knowing when and ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... Youth nor Error, cast the stone! If to have sense of Joy and Pain Too keen,—to rise, to fall again, To live too much,—be sin, why then, This was no pattern among men. But those who turn that later page, The Journal of his middle-age, Watch him serene in either fate,— Philanthropist and Magistrate; Watch him as Husband, Father, Friend, Faithful, and patient to the end; Grieving, as e'en the brave may grieve, But for the loved ones he must leave: These will admit—if any ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... discover that frivolity appealed more powerfully to his secret soul. He was also amazed to discover that his gloom was leaving him. This vanishing of gloom gave him strange sensations, akin to the sensations of a man who, after having worn gaiters into middle-age, abandons them. ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... period in which men cared very little for things which 'the eye hath not seen'. In his use of mottoes, again, which are deliberately sought illustrations for his papers, [Footnote: Spectator 221] and not the sparks which have fired his train of thought, he is typical of the period of middle-age in which men amuse themselves with such academic pastimes. Addison is the very antipodes of the kind of ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... crowned himself therewith, and springing upon the top of the rock, assumed an oratorical attitude, and waved his hand, as if about to harangue the people. Then, while I was wondering what was to come next, he fixed his eye sternly upon a sinister looking man of middle-age, with the head-dress of an inferior chief, who was standing directly in front of him, and began to declaim in Latin, with great vehemence—'Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra,' etcetera, which ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... showed my surprise rather plainly. Mrs. Cavendish, who had married John's father when he was a widower with two sons, had been a handsome woman of middle-age as I remembered her. She certainly could not be a day less than seventy now. I recalled her as an energetic, autocratic personality, somewhat inclined to charitable and social notoriety, with a fondness for opening bazaars and playing the Lady Bountiful. She was a most generous ...
— The Mysterious Affair at Styles • Agatha Christie
... thought, compassionately; yet, blended with the compassion, was the half-unconscious triumph of strong middle-age at sight of the failure of a senior. "That's the first knock. He'll want to mind himself from this out—the next one might hit ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... history of the world have to guess a good deal; so I don't see why I shouldn't state emphatically that, after years and years and years of profound research, the first corset "happened" when Eve suddenly discovered that she was showing signs of middle-age in the middle. So she plaited some reeds together, tied them tightly round her waist-line, and, sure enough, Adam had to put off making that joke about "Once round Eve's waist, twice round the Garden ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... round with a somewhat languid greeting. A tall, well-made man, a little past middle-age, in gaiters and light tweed coat, had stepped out on to the balcony from one of the open windows. In his right hand he was swinging carelessly backwards and forwards by a long ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... some functional disturbance alone; or it may be due to some organic disease of the nerve or to some disease or diseased state outside of the nervous system. It occurs more frequently in women past the middle-age, in those of a nervous tendency. As stated, it affects women more than men. Debility is a frequent cause. Neuralgia is frequently associated with the various forms of anemia. It may occur at the onset of acute diseases like typhoid fever. Exposure ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... ordinary signature a delicious dignity, a patient had been to him a prodigy, something precious for its rarity, even if it called him away from his dinner or ruthlessly rang him up in the middle of the night. But that was a long time ago, in the days of his impecunious youth; and now, in his prosperous middle-age, he would often have willingly bartered a good many patients for a little ...
— A Bachelor's Dream • Mrs. Hungerford
... do not say such a thing! She is so hot-headed, so fond of you. Yes, I saw it from the beginning, and your talk about the insurmountable wall of middle-age did not deceive me. I only hope that will not be a tragic wall for her, for you—or ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... Dumbarton Oaks, separates it from Montrose Park. It is still, as it has always been, I am glad to say, completely unimproved, unspoiled, sweet and rambling and quiet, wending its way along the brook that empties into Rock Creek at the beginning of Oak Hill. I suppose there is hardly a soul of middle-age living in Georgetown who has not fond memories of Lover's Lane, for in the days of our youth we did walk with our lovers; no automobiles or movies filled our Saturday or Sunday afternoons, and very ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker
... Faith, which was the theme of Dante's Song, had produced this Practical Life which Shakespeare was to sing. For Religion then, as it now and always is, was the soul of Practice; the primary vital fact in men's life. And remark here, as rather curious, that Middle-Age Catholicism was abolished, so far as Acts of Parliament could abolish it, before Shakespeare, the noblest product of it, made his appearance. He did make his appearance nevertheless. Nature at her own time, with Catholicism ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... nestling and agreeable manner, on the great rugged figure of the Carrier. It was pleasant to see him, with his tender awkwardness, endeavouring to adapt his rude support to her slight need, and make his burly middle-age a leaning-staff not inappropriate to her blooming youth. It was pleasant to observe how Tilly Slowboy, waiting in the background for the baby, took special cognizance (though in her earliest teens) ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... spends his boyhood struggling against an education, his youth struggling against matrimony and his middle-age struggling against embonpoint; but sooner or later he ...
— A Guide to Men - Being Encore Reflections of a Bachelor Girl • Helen Rowland
... suspiciously. This cheerfulness was unusual in people he had worsted, and the unusual was always to be distrusted. But to the less vigilant, ordinary mind Mr. Walkingshaw merely presented the spectacle of a man of young middle-age with a heart some ten ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... but here have Pride and Truth, That long to give themselves for wage, To shake their wicked sides at youth Restraining reckless middle-age. ...
— The Green Helmet and Other Poems • William Butler Yeats
... and then, in obedience to a gesture from Sebastian, or remembering perhaps the sturdy Republicanism which he had not learnt until middle-age, he sat down again, ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... stared at the photograph. It was the presentment of a stout, good-humoured man of middle-age, whose solemn gaze dwelt on the middle distance in that fixed way which a man achieves only ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... of these feuds with Dante's poem has given to the Middle-Age history of Italy an interest of which it is not undeserving in itself, full as it is of curious exhibitions of character and contrivance, but to which politically it cannot lay claim, amid the social phenomena, so far grander in scale and purpose ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... all the glory of it, but it filled him with a renewal of the sad and bitter resentment, which was his usual mood, instead of joy. He was past middle-age. He worked in a shoe-shop. He had worked in a shoe-shop since he was a young man. There was nothing else in store for him until he was turned out because of old age. Then the future looked like a lurid sunset of misery. He earned reasonably good wages for a man of his ...
— The Shoulders of Atlas - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... comes and takes some of us along his ways into middle-age, will have to pull. Time is a dotard, an aged parent; some boys that are very strong and young are almost too much for him; when he comes to take them from the garden of boyhood they kick and punch; when Time tries to coax them, pointing out the advantages of middle-age, they turn ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... people have told me that. Of course, you know that we were always appallingly alike, and they always said that we should become more so in middle-age. After all, there is only a year between us. We might ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Willems, who, in opposition to the opinion of William Grimm, settles the authorship of the "Reinaert de Vos" on Utenhove, a priest of Aerdenburg. It seems natural to suppose that this most popular of Middle-Age productions should have originated in the very region which later gave to the world a school of painting that incarnated on canvas the phases of animal life, taking its delight and best inspirations in the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... dress, however, suggested that she could not bring herself to believe she was yet out of the hunt, but was still trying to follow it breathlessly on the back of that broken-kneed and sorry steed, late middle-age. There was something ridiculous in the girlish attire intended to convince her fellow creatures that her day was not over; something terrible in the low blouse, short skirt, silk stockings, gauze, lace and fluttering ribbons with which she sought to delude the sneering ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... sometimes cold, conventional, or laboured, we have gracious allegories, pieces of brilliant description, vivid personifications, and something of ingenious analysis of human passion. Nevertheless the work of this Middle-Age disciple of Ovid and of Chretien de Troyes owes more than half its celebrity to the continuation, conceived in an entirely opposite spirit, by his ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... but I traced the general points of middle height and considerable breadth of chest. He had a dark face, with stern features and a heavy brow; his eyes and gathered eyebrows looked ireful and thwarted just now; he was past youth, but had not reached middle-age; perhaps he might be thirty-five. I felt no fear of him, and but little shyness. Had he been a handsome, heroic- looking young gentleman, I should not have dared to stand thus questioning him against his will, and offering my services unasked. I had hardly ever seen ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... part opens with the sorrowful scene, "Tristis est anima mea," Christ's sad words in the walk to Gethsemane,—an unutterably pathetic solo, with an accompaniment which is a marvel of expressive instrumentation. The next number is the old Middle-Age hymn, "Stabat Mater dolorosa," in which Liszt has combined voices and instruments in a manner, particularly in the "Inflammatus," almost overpowering. Solos, duets, quartets, choruses, orchestra, and organ are all handled with consummate skill. It has been aptly characterized as having the dimensions ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... Mother Hubbard wrapper and a stiff, clean blue-checked apron, she was not in the least a peasant. Her figure was tall and spare, her hair gray and drawn into an uncompromising knot, her face wrinkled and shrewd, her eyes soft, and full of the experience that middle-age brings to the native American woman who has lived all her life in the sparsely-settled ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon |
