"Second childhood" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is called to recite. Forth steps a row of queer-looking little fellows, wearing square-skirted coats, and small clothes, with buttons at the knee. They look like so many grandfathers in their second childhood. These lads are to be sent to Cambridge, and educated for the learned professions. Old Master Cheever has lived so long, and seen so many generations of school-boys grow up to be men, that now he can ...
— True Stories from History and Biography • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... which, with the microscope, may be detected the hairs of missionary martyrs. In fine weather, of course, these attractions would be advertised in vain; but the fact is, our whole community has been reduced by the cruelty of the elements to a sort of second childhood; the rain which permeates everything is ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... grotesque figures, these caricatures of humanity! A comical creature, surely, this Chinaman, the pantaloon of civilization. How useful he has been to us for our farces, our comic operas! This yellow baby, in his ample pinafore, who lived thousands of years ago, who has now passed into this strange second childhood. ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... — N. age; oldness^ &c adj.; old age, advanced age, golden years; senility, senescence; years, anility^, gray hairs, climacteric, grand climacteric, declining years, decrepitude, hoary age, caducity^, superannuation; second childhood, second childishness; dotage; vale of years, decline of life, sear and yellow leaf [Macbeth]; threescore years and ten; green old age, ripe age; longevity; time of life. seniority, eldership; elders &c (veteran) 130; firstling; doyen, father; primogeniture. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... and when I remembered how for years I had laughed at the tenderness of the fairest women of the French and Scottish courts—I could not help saying to myself, "Poor fool! you have achieved an early second childhood." But when I recalled Madge in all her beauty, purity, and helplessness, my cynicism left me, and I, who had enjoyed all of life's ambitious possibilities, calmly reached the conclusion that it is sometimes a blessed privilege to be a fool. While I dwelt on thoughts of Madge, all the latent ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... "mere boys" and "visionary young men"; Franklin was an "old dotard" and "in his second childhood"; and as for Washington, "What did he know ...
— Hero Stories from American History - For Elementary Schools • Albert F. Blaisdell
... outcast wretch, not secret foe, Whose whispering lips would dare assail His spotless life with slanderous tale. Godlike and bounteous, just, sincere, E'en to his very foemen dear: Who would without a cause neglect The right, and such a son reject? And if a king such order gave, In second childhood, passion's slave, What son within his heart would lay The senseless order, and obey? Come, Rama, ere this plot be known Stand by me and secure the throne. Stand like the King who rules below, Stand aided by thy brother's bow: How can the might of ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... your thoughts all the while. Still, you will be near. You will be very beautiful, Mary, riding up the trail through the pines, with all the scents of the evergreens blowing about you, and I—well, I must go back to a second childhood and ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... sights of superior interest, and furnish them with all their petty emotions. So is it with nations, as with men who have passed the age of their strength, and reached the period of senility and second childhood. ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... After having accomplished the military enterprise entrusted to him, he fell into a lingering fever, at the termination of which he was so much reduced that he was only kept alive by milk, which he drank from a woman's breast. Such was the gentle second childhood of the man who had almost literally been drinking blood for seventy years. He died ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... of the Realm of Thought, it was not surprising that my judgment failed often to decide correctly the many questions presented to it by its abnormally communicative subjects. At first I seemed to live a second childhood. I did with delight many things which I had first learned to do as a child—the more so as it had been necessary for me to learn again to eat and walk, and now to talk. I had much lost time to make up; and for a while ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... court patronage, even in the remotest corners of that vast empire; but, when he thus voluntarily stripped himself of his great personal wealth, the remainder of the community seemed instinctively to adopt the conclusion also that he had reached a second childhood. This may explain the fact of his importance rapidly declining; and, if privacy was his object, the veteran had soon a free indulgence of his wishes. Whatever views the world might entertain of this act of the Major, to himself and to his child it seemed no more than a natural gift ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... Italian—this poor creature—this sordid wretch—who has just refused the king of England a million, would not perhaps give me a thousand pistoles for the news I could carry him. Mordioux! I am falling into second childhood—I am becoming stupid indeed! The idea of Mazarin giving anything! ha! ha! ha!" and he laughed in ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... began, history is but the narrative of kingdoms and states progressing to maturity or decay. Man himself is but an epitome of the nations of men. In youth, all energy; in prime of life, all enterprise and vigour; in senility, all weakness and second childhood. Then, England, learn thy fate from the unerring page of time. Sooner or later, it shall arrive that thou shalt be tributary to some nation, hitherto, I trust, unborn; and thy degenerate sons shall read that liberty was ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... his second childhood," said Arnold, trying to make light of the affair; "he must mean the ...
— Leslie Ross: - or, Fond of a Lark • Charles Bruce
... years ago, had a hearty laugh, which their successors have often re-echoed; they said that helpless suckling and its priests put them so much in mind of their own old man, surrounded by his cardinals, he! he! Old age is second childhood." ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... enough to last all of us for many months, if, unfortunately, we should not earlier be relieved from our dreadful situation. My father had become strong enough to go about and take care of himself, but his mind was feebler, and he seemed more like an old man in his second childhood than one in the prime of life as he was. He was not troublesome to any one, nor was there any fear of trusting him by himself. He was only like an imbecile old man—and such even the captain ...
— Lizzy Glenn - or, The Trials of a Seamstress • T. S. Arthur
... matters in the recollections of our earliest years so minute that to speak of them is only becoming to second childhood. "The soul discovers great things from casual circumstances", says Porphory. Providence provides temporary bridges through life which commonly fall to pieces after we pass over them and are forgotten. It is not so with me; one bridge remains whole and more beautified by time—that ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... rollicking ease into our seats (for we are a bold, devil-may-care race, the C's of Battersea), and an oath is administered to us in a totally inaudible manner by an individual resembling an Army surgeon in his second childhood. We understand, however, that we are to well and truly try the case between our sovereign lord the King and the prisoner at the bar, neither of whom has put in an appearance ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... have a martial dignity, a noble enduring spirit of their own. Race comes out in that, as it does in the endless sacrifices, soma drinking, magical austerities, and puerile follies of Vedic and Brahmanic gods, the deities of a people fallen early into its sacerdotage and priestly second childhood. Thus race declares itself in the ultimate literary form and character of mythology, while the common savage basis and stuff of myths may be clearly discerned in the horned, and cannibal, and shape-shifting, and adulterous gods of Greece, of India, of ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... romantic revival, either from the German Lenores or the English Otrantos. And so it is with the novelists of the Elizabethan age. Renouncing the traditions of the older romance, which was adult and perfect a hundred years before in Malory, but had now fallen into a second childhood, and determined on the creation of a new and genuine form of literary expression, they paid the price of originality in the vein of childishness ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... though I were having my second childhood. It was so nice to be at college that term with the grown-up girls, and now I have to go with infants like little Hilda and Gertrude, only not so nice. I had first year Math in High School, you know, last year, and my German Prof regarded me as a babe and wouldn't let me read things because ...
— The Wide Awake Girls in Winsted • Katharine Ellis Barrett
... is apt to speak of itself in the third person. A child seldom says, "I will," or "I am hungry," but "Louis wants," "Louis is hungry," or whatever his name may be. This phenomenon reappears in the second childhood of old age, when the power of reflection is weakened, and there is a reversion to the primitive animal condition. The same phenomenon also occurs in idiots, in whom there is a morbid defect of ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... into her hands as jewels that had been stolen from her by robbers. With those, perhaps (for the minutes of dreams can stretch into ages), was given back to her by God the bliss of childhood. By special privilege for her might be created, in this farewell dream, a second childhood, innocent as the first; but not, like that, sad with the gloom of a fearful mission in the rear. This mission had now been fulfilled. The storm was weathered; the skirts even of that mighty storm were drawing off. The blood that she was to reckon for had been exacted; the tears that ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... school, or rather the two schools, to which David Copperfield goes. The whole idea of David Copperfield's life is that he had the dregs of life before the wine of it. He knew the worst of the world before he knew the best of it. His childhood at Dr. Strong's is a second childhood. Now for this purpose the two schools are perfectly well adapted. Mr. Creakle's school is not only, like Mr. Squeers's school, a bad school, it is a bad influence upon David Copperfield. Dr. Strong's school is ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton |
