"Precocious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... death in brooding and novel-reading. Grief, and to no small extent idleness, had shaken his whole nervous system and quickened his imagination. His tears had been like warm April showers falling on fruit trees, wakening them to a precocious burgeoning: but alas! only too often the blossoms are doomed to wither and perish in a frosty May night, before the fruit has had time ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... with a wonderful freshness of consciousness. It is as though a strong, sensible man of forty should suddenly develop a genius in art; his attitude would be quite different from that of a growing boy, no matter how precocious he might be. So, while the Russian character is marked by an extreme sensitiveness to mental impressions, it is without the rawness and immaturity of the American. The typical American has some strong qualities that seem in ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... truthful. Strange that Society should have a rage For that anomaly—artificial Age! Dust on their heads our pretty women toss, Just to deprive it of its pristine gloss. Make ashen-white your eyebrows, there, and lashes, Precocious hags! The world's but dust and ashes. Wrinkles and crowsfeet next must have their turn (To limn them in let toilette artists learn), Then make each belle bald, scraggy-necked and toothless, Grey hair alone won't make Society youthless. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 100, 13 June 1891 • Various
... such precocious employment of young women, are not less destructive of their ultimate utility and respectability in life. Habituated from their earliest years to one undeviating mechanical employment, they acquire great skill in it, but grow up utterly ignorant of any thing else. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... been considered precocious, when thee was little, to call them so. But if I were in thy place, I would not do it now. It gives the wrong impression of thy manners. I think thee has very pretty manners," ...
— The Cricket • Marjorie Cooke
... struggled to disguise from them the cause of that emotion which they could not conceal. For a time the children were silent and bewildered; then Hortense, though with evident misgivings, attempted to console her parents. The events of her saddened life had rendered her unusually precocious. Turning to her mother, she begged her not to give way to so much sorrow, assuring her that she could not think that her father was dangerously ill. Then addressing Eugene, she said, in a peculiar tone which her parents felt ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... This is not so precocious as Mozart's musical compositions at the same age, but how could the boy Hawthorne have given a clearer account of himself and his situation at the time, without one word of complaint? It is worth noting also that his prediction in regard to Doctor Kitridge proved to be correct ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... of seventeen he had been sent to a German University, and at the age of twenty-one had appeared in London, in a stockbroker's office, where he was soon known as an accomplished linguist, and as a very clever fellow,—precocious, not given to many pleasures, apt for work, but hardly trustworthy by employers, not as being dishonest, but as having a taste for being a master rather than a servant. Indeed his period of servitude was very short. It was not in his nature to be active ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... theatrical direction, was, in another way, indicated at a yet earlier date, and not one jot less pointedly. It was so, we mean, at the very opening of his career in authorship, when having just sprung into precocious celebrity as the writer of the Sketches and of the earlier numbers of Pickwick, he contributed an opera and a couple of farces with brilliant success to the boards of the St. James's Theatre. Braham and Parry and ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... that he had any precocious predilection for study, and his parents, who for the first ten years of his life were his only teachers, were too wise to stimulate his mind beyond the ordinary attainments of his age. having lost her first four children in infancy, his mother watched with ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... accurate knowledge of the Roman, Grecian, and English histories, and a somewhat precocious insight too of the characters of ...
— Confessions of an Etonian • I. E. M.
... confessor of your adopted mother, addressing himself to me through M. Rodin, called my attention to yourself, by reporting the astonishing progress you had made at the school of the Brothers. I soon found, indeed, that your excellent conduct, your gentle, modest character, and your precocious intelligence, were worthy of the most tender interest. From that moment I kept my eyes upon you, and at the end of some time, seeing that you did not fall off, it appeared to me that there was something more in you than the stuff that makes a workman. We agreed with your adopted mother, ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... the precocious talents displayed by Mademoiselle de l'Enclos are not uncommon in the twentieth century, but the application she made of them was remarkable and uncommon. Accomplished in music, learned and proficient in the languages, a philosopher of no small degree, and of a ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... "He's very precocious and very sensitive, and his mother thinks she can't begin to guard him too early." Miss Ambient's head drooped a little to one side, and her eyes fixed themselves on futurity. Then suddenly there was ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... in America enter so early into life that they have not time to obtain the acquirements supposed to be requisite with us, it is much the same thing with the females of the upper classes, who, from the precocious ripening by the climate and consequent early marriages, may be said to throw down their dolls that they may ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... for uneasiness: the inundation is at hand, which has never failed since the commencement of our geological period. In another few weeks the prodigious river will spread along its banks, just as in the times of the God Amen, a precocious and impetuous life. And meanwhile the orange-trees, the jasmine and the honeysuckle, which men have taken care to water with water from the Nile, are full of riotous bloom. As we pass the gardens of Old Cairo, which alternate with the tumbling ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... after having been appointed to be his father's successor in the chair, died in 1790, at the age of twenty-two, of a consumption. Beattie felt the blow deeply, and published, soon after, the life and remains of the precocious youth. Our readers must all remember the exquisite story of his teaching him the idea of a Creator by sowing his name in cresses in the garden. The loss of Montague, also a youth of much promise, by a rapid fever in 1796, completed the prostration of the poor father. It was ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... who ranks among the world's greatest theologians and metaphysicians, was born in 1703 in East Windsor, Connecticut. Like Cotton Mather, Edwards was precocious, entering Yale before he was thirteen. The year previous to his going to college, he wrote a paper on spiders, showing careful scientific observation and argument. This paper has been called "one of the rarest specimens of precocious scientific ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... desired that her husband should be the second personage of the state in order that she might come immediately after Livia or even be placed directly on an equality with her. According to the Roman ideas of the family and of its discipline, this was a precocious and excessive ambition, unbecoming a matron, much less a young girl. For the duty of the woman was to follow faithfully and submissively the ambitions of her lord and not to impart to him her own ambitions or make him her ...
— The Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero
... the modern boom is that it is too precocious. It knows more before it gets its clothes on than the nurse, the physician and its parents. It then dies before the sap starts in ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... intellect singularly precocious, William Riddell, so early as the age of seven, composed in correct and interesting prose, and produced in his eighth year some vigorous poetry. With a highly retentive memory he retained the results of an extended ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... the Public Schools. When they become wives and mothers, they have none of the habits or character necessary to govern their household and to train their children properly. Hence arise that growing neglect or laxity of family discipline; that insubordination, that lawlessness, and precocious depravity of Young America; that almost total lack of filial reverence and obedience with the children of this generation. Exceptions there happily are; but the number of children that grow up without any ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... lad, his was a precocious intelligence; and it had been fed upon meat for strong men. He had heard of Alexander VI.'s colossal infamies, and those of Caesar Borgia as well; and of the kingdoms ranging to this or that standard after the death of Pope and Prince. He was nine years old then. Old enough, too, ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... her childhood: the man and woman who might have been her father and mother; who fought and wrangled over her precocious little life; abused or caressed her as she sided with either; and then left her with a circus troupe, where she first tasted the power of her courage, her beauty, and her recklessness. She remembered those flashes of triumph that left a fever in her veins—a ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... always so precocious that I cannot recall the time when he was young enough to be Lady Randolph's son; certainly, I cannot recall the time when she was old enough to be ...
— Real Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... drank in all the precocious wiles of the Manhattan urchins quickly after his sturdy Odalisque mother had dragged him, a squalling urchin, out of the steerage confines of ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... feeling. My education, I thought, had failed to create these feelings in sufficient strength to resist the dissolving influence of analysis, while the whole course of my intellectual cultivation had made precocious and premature analysis the inveterate habit of my mind. I was thus, as I said to myself, left stranded at the commencement of my voyage, with a well-equipped ship and a rudder, but no sail; without ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... seen that in the tale the young Prince's sister (Margaret) is described as residing at the castle. Now Margaret married Charles of Alencon at Blois, in October 1509, and forthwith removed to Alencon. Possibly Francis, who was very precocious, especially in matters of gallantry, engaged in the love affair narrated by his sister at a yet earlier age than she asserts, in which case the town she refers to would ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. IV. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... appears what purports to be a niece of the billet landlady's, a Mdlle. Juliette, of the Paris stage, with a distinctly coming-on disposition (and frock). The uxorious Brigade-Major, weakly consenting to the deception, suffers the tortures of the damned by reason of the gallantries of the precocious Staff-Captain and the old-enough-to-know-better Brigadier. There is marching and counter-marching of detached units in the small hours; arrival of the Brigade Interpreter with Intelligence's reports; sorrowful conviction in the Brigadier's mind that Juliette is Olga—Olga Thingummy, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 21, 1920 • Various
... and acquire a certain temporary vulgarity. A few, with the not uncommon enthusiasm of aliens, had adopted certain native peculiarities with a zeal that far exceeded any indigenous performance. But dominant through all was the continual suggestion of precocious fruition and premature decay that lingered like a sad perfume in the garden, but made itself persistent if less ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... fitting conclusion to a precocious education by the patriots and philosophers of his own country, with practical observations in the courts of Spain and the Netherlands, of the weak but amiable Louis XVI., and the accomplished, but depraved, ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... utter any precocious wisdom. Certainly, one can get at the substance of things. True, there is enough mystery and perplexity about the system of the world, and at times all life looms up a terrible enigma, so increasing in difficulty of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... narrative of child life, describing the simple doings and sayings of a very charming and rather precocious child. This is a delightful book for ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... ill-ordered lessons, his precocious intelligence was remarked by everybody. It was clear that such lucky gifts should not be neglected. Monnica, no doubt, was the first to get this into her head, and she advised Patricius to make Augustin read ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... the gift of telling a lie with most portentous gravity. They wear an air of the most winning candour and guileless innocence, when they are all the while plotting some petty scheme against you. They are certainly far more precocious than English children; they realise the hard struggle for life far more quickly. The poorer classes can hardly be said to have any childhood; as soon as they can toddle they are sent to weed, cut grass, gather fuel, tend herds, or do anything that will bring them in a ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... across the bleak prairie, a lone watcher. Ascending, Carl saw that it was Eugene Field Linderbeck, a Plato freshman. That amused him. He grinningly planned a conversation. Every one said that "Genie Linderbeck was queer." A precocious boy of fifteen, yet the head of his class in scholarship; reported to be interested in Greek books quite outside of the course, fond of drinking tea, and devoid of merit in the three manly arts—athletics, flirting, and breaking rules by smoking. Genie was small, anemic, and too well dressed. ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... fell under Mr. Stackpole's touch, as if it had been a black frost. The American government was a rickety experiment go to pieces presently; American institutions an alternative between fallacy and absurdity, the fruit of raw minds and precocious theories; American liberty a contradiction; American character a compound of quackery and pretension; American society (except at Mrs. Evelyn's) an anomaly; American destiny the same with that of a cactus, or a volcano a period of rest followed by a period of excitement; not, however, like ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... posterity; but our own times have seen a bolder war, a broader peace, and a richer development of science, invention, and eloquence. For fifty years, England was pronounced to have worn herself out by the prolific brilliancy of the half century before; like a precocious infant, to have anticipated her powers, and ensured their premature decay; like the Boeotians, to have had her Pindaric period, and thenceforward to have paid for its raptures and renown by perpetual darkness; or ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... or hoops: his limbs were never ignominiously confined by those "triangular arrangements" incidental to babyhood. At five, when other children are bumping their heads over steep stairs, he smoked cinnamon segars, and was a precocious, astute little villain at seven. For thirty-six months he folded books for Harper & Brothers, and at the advanced age of ten years three months, was bound over to the tender mercies of Flint & Snarle for "thirty dollars per year ...
— Daisy's Necklace - And What Came of It • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... true, but there is more than this. The precocious development of early talent and originality is the thing which strangely terrifies these examination-maniacs. They have a horror of the man who teaches himself. They have a horror of any one who ventures to think for himself and to ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... average disparity of some few years in the ages of husband and wife. This may be referred probably to economic conditions in part, and also to the fact that girlhood becomes womanhood at a somewhat earlier age than boyhood becomes manhood. The girl is more precocious. Thus though she be twenty and her husband twenty-three, ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... He did not even know he was himself the meeting-point of all the brilliant and beautiful persons, assembled in the publisher's Saturday Salon, for although a youthful minor poet, he was modest and lovable. Perhaps his Oxford tutorship was sobering. At any rate his head remained unturned by his precocious fame, and to meet these other young men and women—his reverend seniors on the slopes of Parnassus—gave him more pleasure than the receipt of "royalties." Not that his publisher afforded him much opportunity of contrasting the two ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... visit at Beaumont Hall on the coast of Essex, a few miles distant from Harwich. It was then the residence of Mr. Canham.... I was invited to ascend the attics in order to read some lines, imprinted by a cowboy of precocious intellect. I found these in handsome, neatly executed letters, printed and burnished with leaf-gold, on the wall of his sleeping-room. They were really golden verses, and may well be styled Pythagorean from ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 215, December 10, 1853 • Various
... the favour of the million was less concise, and seems to have been originally aimed against precocious youths who gave themselves the airs of manhood before their time. "Does your mother know you're out?" was the provoking query addressed to young men of more than reasonable swagger, who smoked cigars in the streets, ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... later the November wind shifted. "Nov. 5, 1794. Clear, wind N. W. Made Austin a coat. Sat up all day. Went into the kitchen." The baby, it appears, had an abnormally large head and was dipped, day after day, in rude hydropathy, into an icy spring. A precocious childhood was followed by a stern, somewhat unhappy, but aspiring boyhood. The little fellow, lying prone with his brothers before the firelight of the kitchen, reading English poetry from his father's library, used to pray that he too might become ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... errors: his youth was passed in the prisons of the state; his passions, becoming envenomed by solitude, and his intellect being rendered more acute by contact with the irons of his dungeon, where his mind lost that modesty which rarely survives the infamy of precocious punishments. ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... self-consuming energy of talent prematurely developed. Her voice had distinctive quality, unusual in little girls of nine. When she talked, it was with perfect articulation and a sense of the value and beauty of words. Her manners were prettily wayward, but not precocious. She moved with the quiet self-possession of one who has something to do and knows just how to do it, one who took her little self seriously but ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... my eyes chanced to turn toward the main entrance door of the East Room. I saw, pushing through, a certain page, a young boy of good family, who was employed by Mr. Calhoun as messenger. He knew me perfectly well, as he did almost every one else in Washington, and with precocious intelligence his gaze picked me ...
— 54-40 or Fight • Emerson Hough
... beautiful in any country; but with her beauty there was combined elegance, both in dress and manner, that told you at once she was a lady accustomed to society and the world. And this, although still young—she certainly could not have been much over twenty. Louisiana has a precocious climate, however; and a Creole of twenty will count for an Englishwoman of ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... Joseph Schelling was born at Leonberg, Wuertemberg, January 27, 1775, the son of a learned clergyman and writer on theology. He was a precocious child and made rapid progress in his studies, entering the Theological Seminary at Tuebingen at the age of fifteen. Between the ages of nineteen and twenty-two he wrote a number of able treatises in the spirit of the new idealism, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... The precocious little savage was known to every rider on the trail from St. Joe to Sacramento. Of course the Indians were always on the alert to steal the horses that belonged to the stations, but where Little Cayuse ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... wide streets, finer and wider than almost any in London, stretch away for miles in every direction. At any hour of the day thousands of persons may be observed scurrying along them with true Cheapside bustle." The Melbourne youth, however, appears to have been precocious. "I was delighted," remarks this authority, "with the Colonial young stock. The average Australian boy is a slim, olive-complexioned young rascal, fond of Cavendish, cricket, and chuck-penny, and systematically insolent to girls, policemen, and new chums.... At twelve years ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... sciences had equal reason to be satisfied with him? What I have above stated, together with the report of M. de Keralio, bear evidence of his backwardness in almost every branch of education except mathematics. Neither was it, as Sir Walter affirms, his precocious progress in mathematics that occasioned him to be removed to Paris. He had attained the proper age, and the report of him was favourable, therefore he was very naturally included among the number of the five who ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... towards the wild moors above their home rather than into the village. Over a century has passed, and practically no change has come to the moorland side of the house, so that we can imagine the precocious toddling children going hand-in-hand over the grass-lands towards the moors beyond, as though we had travelled ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... temps passe"—seems to have been a somewhat Rabelaisian ditty; by no means proper singing for a Sunday morning in a boys' school. But boys will be boys, even in France; and the famous "esprit Gaulois" was somewhat precocious in the forties, I suppose. Perhaps it is now, if it still exists (which I doubt—the dirt remains, but all the fun seems ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... business compels them to be away from home all day; but young children may be, and quite often are, killed by her cuddling and coddling and doctoring and preaching: above all, by her continuous attempts to excite precocious sentimentality, a practice as objectionable, and possibly as mischievous, as the worst tricks of ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... perceived either this difficulty, or a second which this treatise is calculated to excite. He places the Supper of the Lorde at the head of the numerous productions of Robert Crowley, as if its authorship was perfectly ascertained. But Crowley must have been a precocious polemic if he wrote a theological treatise, like that answered by More, at least a year previously to his entering the university. The date of his admission at Oxford was 1534; he was elected Fellow of Magdalene in 1542; he printed the first edition of Piers Plowman in 1550; and was still ...
— Notes and Queries 1850.03.23 • Various
... lady was nine years old when she perceived with a discernment somewhat precocious that her sleeping companion ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... from motives of economy and partly for the boy's instruction. Here Fleeming and his father spent a pleasant time together, sketching old castles, and observing the customs of the peasantry. Fleeming was precocious, and at thirteen had finished a romance of three hundred lines in heroic measure, a Scotch novel, and innumerable poetical fragments, none of which are now extant. He learned German in Frankfort; and on the family migrating to Paris the following year, he studied French and ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... his worship is Asia; Europe is the precocious, self-centered, forward-striving child; but the land of the mother is and was Africa. In subtle and mysterious way, despite her curious history, her slavery, polygamy, and toil, the spell of the African mother pervades her land. Isis, the mother, is still ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... Precious multekosta. Precipice krutegajxo. Precipitancy trorapideco. Precipitate trorapida. Precipitation trorapideco. Precise preciza. Precisely gxuste. Precision precizeco, akurateco. Preclude eksigi, malhelpi. Precocious frumatura. Precocity frumaturo—eco. Precursor antauxulo. Predatory rabadega. Predecessor antauxulo. Predestination sortdifino. Predetermination antauxdecido. Predict antauxdiri, ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... This precocious youth was suing for a fair girl's favor, and made Ulrich his confidant. One day, when Moor and Sanchez's father had gone with the king to Toledo, he took him to a balcony in the upper story of the treasury, directly opposite to the gate-keeper's ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... achievement is impressive, as one reviews his career. His most thoughtful, though not his most eloquent verse, his richest vein of letter-writing, his most influential addresses to the public, came toward the close of his life. Precocious as was his gift for expression, and versatile and brilliant as had been his productiveness in the 1848 era, he was true to his Anglo-Saxon stock in being more effective at seventy than he had been at thirty. He was one of the ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... precocious manner of the Jewish child, inquired with another elaborate bow if Wilhelmine would care to hear his voice. She begged him to let her hear the seraphim sing. The boy caught the note of irony in her phrase; flushing deeply, he laid aside his guitar and would have run away had not Wilhelmine, ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... good-naturedly abandons to two Osmiae, her free tenants: the Three-horned Osmia and Latreille's Osmia. These old corridors, which save labour, are in great demand; but there are not many vacant, as the more precocious Osmiae have already taken possession of most of them; and therefore the building of new cells soon begins. These cells are cemented to the surface of the nest, which thus increases in thickness every year. The edifice of cells is ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... of what I may call the leisure class of society overwork is of course much more rare than in our normal schools for girls, but the precocious claims of social life and the indifference of parents as to hours and systematic living needlessly add to the ever-present difficulties of the school-teacher, whose control ceases when the pupil ...
— Wear and Tear - or, Hints for the Overworked • Silas Weir Mitchell
... from morning to night. A light gig, that had once belonged to the custom-house, was polished and painted under his special directions, (often did we sigh for one of King's worst "fours!") and the fishermen marvelled at such precocious ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... That leafy tree was distinguished among fig trees; the others offered no invitation, gave no promise; "the time of figs was not yet"; they, in due season would bring forth fruit and leaves; but this precocious and leafy pretender waved its umbrageous limbs as in boastful assertion of superiority. For those who responded to its ostentatious invitation, for the hungering Christ who came seeking fruit, it had naught but leaves. Even for the purposes of the lesson involved, ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... of the 1931 crop have been kept to the present time. All have deteriorated to a greater or lesser degree except the Stanley, which is as sweet and good as when gathered. The Stanley and Caldwell are precocious as grafted trees. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... precocious gallantry evidently was not considered as gratuitous as his experimental metallurgy. But as his eyes followed his daughter's wholesome, Phyllis-like figure, a new idea took possession of him: needless to say, however, it was in the line of another personal aggrievement, albeit it ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... a general diversion which dominated all the preceding events and particularly attracted the attention of the robbers. One of them flew to the woman's side, reassuring her in the most affectionate manner, while complimenting her upon her son's precocious courage, and courteously pressed upon her the salts and perfumes with which these gentlemen were ordinarily provided for their own use. She regained consciousness. In the excitement of the moment her travelling companions noticed that the highwayman's mask had fallen off, ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... schooldom of Scott, that denotes anything like precocious talent. It is, however better ascertained that his early rambles amidst the Tweed scenery retarded his educational pursuits. He received the rudiments of knowledge under the home tuition of his mother; next ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 571 - Volume 20, No. 571—Supplementary Number • Various
... table laughed. It was the pleased, proud laugh that flutters the family dinner-table when the infant son and heir says something precocious and impudent. ...
— Ranson's Folly • Richard Harding Davis
... scrambled out of the carriage again, Mary followed her with longing eyes. Something of maternal tenderness mingled with her love of that beautiful child; suffering had rendered her strangely precocious, and that prophetic spirit, which might have sprung from a mind too early stimulated, filled her whole being as with the love ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... return to the New Church, past the statue of Grotius in the great square, in order to look again at that philosopher's memorial. Grotius, who was born at Delft, was extraordinarily precocious. He went to Leyden University and studied under Scaliger when he was eleven; at sixteen he was practising as a lawyer at The Hague. This is D. Goslings' translation of the inscription ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... person with her hair dressed in the prevailing fashion, and an air of some gentility, which clashed a little with a certain slatternliness that pervaded her attire. She was rather a pretty girl, but had the faded London look of late hours, and precocious cares, instead of the fresh bloom and girlish brightness which ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... said Miss Barrons with an appreciative glance at his precocious brow. "I think that's much better too. You don't have half as good a time if you go to ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... letter and answered it. Since then they had written to each other regularly. There was nothing sentimental, hinted at or implied, in the correspondence. Whatever the faults of Sidney's romantic visions were, they did not tend to precocious flirtation. The Plainfield boys, attracted by her beauty and repelled by her indifference and aloofness, could have told that. She never expected to meet John Lincoln, nor did she wish to do so. In the correspondence ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... and exciting as that of any hero of romance, and who has told it with a vividness and graphic power which few writers of romance have equalled. "He was one of the last of those," remarks Mr. Reeve, "who went out to India as simple adventurers." His boyhood and youth were full of precocious adventure and achievement. At the age of sixteen he obtained a commission in the military contingent of the Nizam. At seventeen he was employed as interpreter on courts-martial, and at eighteen was appointed "assistant police superintendent" ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... and at twelve years of age the beautiful child, with precocious firmness, had steadily refused to learn the alphabet. Three teachers, chosen from the most able and patient instructors, a priest, a philosopher, and a colonel, had attempted in turn to bend his youthful obstinacy; but the priest had wasted his philosophy, the philosopher ...
— Laboulaye's Fairy Book • Various
... that the messenger of the Liberator confided the missives that communicated this important intelligence to her father. She little knew the contents of the billet which she carried him in safety, nor did he confide them to the child. He himself did not dream the precocious extent of that enthusiasm which she felt almost equally in the common cause, and in the person of its great advocate and champion. Her father simply praised her care and diligence, rewarded her with his fondest caresses, and then proceeded with ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... capital of Helvetia. Morat still shows many a mark and relic of its siege by Charles the Bold and of the overthrow of his forces by the Swiss. Payerne was the birthplace, in 1779, of Jomini, the greatest of all writers on military operations, whose precocious genius, while he was a mere stripling and before he had witnessed any battles or manoeuvres, penetrated the secret of Bonaparte's combinations and victorious campaigns, which veteran commanders were ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... thronged with half the people of Kubota on foot and in kurumas, red vans drawn by horses, pairs of policemen in kurumas, hundreds of children being carried, hundreds more on foot, little girls, formal and precocious looking, with hair dressed with scarlet crepe and flowers, hobbling toilsomely along on high clogs, groups of men and women, never intermixing, stalls driving a "roaring trade" in cakes and sweetmeats, ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... Whig ranks was now won over to the national cause, of which Pitt was seen to be the incarnation. Already at Eton and Oxford George Canning had shown the versatility of his genius and the precocious maturity of his eloquence. When his Oxford friend, Jenkinson (the future Earl of Liverpool) made a sensational debut in the House on the Tory side, Sheridan remarked that the Whigs would soon provide an ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... describe my son. Like all children, he was imitative, so had commenced very early to make a collection of insects, and this was sufficient to give him a precocious taste for natural history; but in his character he was earnest and reflective, and very eager for knowledge. Sumichrast took pleasure in the boy's intelligence, and often amused himself by arguing with him. From the flashes of childish humor which ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... the individuals themselves in building up their bodies, strengthening their minds, and preparing them to reproduce their species in maturer years. There is a serious day of reckoning for early indulgence; for precocious persons (unless their constitutions are as powerful as their desires) who give way to their passions at their first exactions, barter their youth for their enjoyment, and are old and weary of the world at an ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... whom he treated with the same distinction he would have used towards my wife. He had presented us to his wife, and had come several times to see us with her and her daughter Sara. Sara was only thirteen, but she was extremely precocious, dark complexioned, and full of wit; she was continually uttering naivetes, of which she understood the whole force, although looking at her face one would have thought her perfectly innocent. She excelled in the art of making ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... precocious child," she exclaimed, "who has been put in her place! No one has ever turned me inside out so skilfully, has made me feel such an ignorant little donkey. Do you know, I half like you for it, Prince Shan, and ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... and aristocratic character to their name. The "de Fontanges l'Hommadieu" were, however, only known to their neighbors, after the Western fashion, by their stepfather's name,—when they were known at all—which was seldom. For the boy was unpleasantly conceited as a precocious worldling, and the girl as unpleasantly complacent in her role of ingenue. The household was completely dominated by Mrs. Randolph. A punctilious Catholic, she attended all the functions of the adjacent mission, and the shadow of a black soutane at twilight gliding through ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... to forget your past life; you have loved me in good faith and I shall never regret, although I should die for it, the day I gave myself to you. You thought you were entering upon a new life and that with me, you would forget the women who had deceived you. Alas! Octave, I used to smile at that precocious experience which you said you had been through, and of which I heard you boast like a child who knows nothing of life. I thought I had but to will it, and all that there was that was good in your heart would come to your lips with my first kiss. ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... only by comparison with her own, which he compassionately used to pity, saying frequently, when she declined the delicacies that he pressed upon her, "Why, you poor child! Heaven has not blessed you with an appetite." Of the precocious feeling and imagination of the poor little girl, thus taken out of her own sphere of life into one so different and so dangerous, I remember a very curious instance, told me by herself. One of the houses where ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... keeping a tobacco shop. About 1746 she married again, most fortunately for her son, for her second husband was Peter Pelham, a mezzotint engraver of considerable merit, who gave the boy lessons in drawing. He proved an apt and precocious pupil, and by the time he had reached seventeen had executed ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... poems of tenderness at which the man will smile later, finding so far different from him in all his tastes, him whom he desired to have for a brother. It happens, however, in certain natures of a sensibility particularly precocious and faithful at the same time, that the awakening of effective life is so strong, so encroaching, that the impassioned friendship persists, first through the other awakening, that of sensuality, so fatal to all the senses of delicacy, then ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... against a peeling wall sleepy-faced boys with precocious eyes kept up a lazy hair-pulling, surreptitious wrestling bout. They rose indifferently in response to furiously repeated bellows for their assistance—a business of carrying typewritten bits of paper between desks a few feet apart; or of sauntering with eleventh-hour ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... Stackpole's touch, as if it had been a black frost. The American government was a rickety experiment; go to pieces presently,—American institutions an alternative between fallacy and absurdity, the fruit of raw minds and precocious theories;—American liberty a contradiction;— American character a compound of quackery and pretension;—American society (except at Mrs. Evelyn's) an anomaly;—American destiny the same with that of a Cactus or a volcano; a period of rest followed by a period of excitement; ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... the first. The second, though less precocious, is yet more enjoyable. Besides, we know it is true, while the other—well, it is not ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... you shooting at?" "I am shooting at you, you d——d old cuss." "What are you shooting at me for?" mildly inquired the lieutenant. "Because you had your hands on the dead-line," answered the boy. At this moment the sergeant of the guard came up, and taking the precocious ruffian by the collar, shook him with considerable energy, and demanded of him very fiercely, "What the devil are you shooting at that prisoner for, you little scoundrel?" The boy replied that the prisoner had his hands on the dead-line. Whereupon the sergeant shook him again, told him he ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... their foe. Charles XII was a mere boy, but precocious, gloomy, and sensitive, and endowed with all the martial determination and heroism of his ancestors. He desired nothing better than to fight against overwhelming odds, and the fury of the youthful commander soon earned him the sobriquet ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... by inadequate information. The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy. The mind's reactions anticipate in such cases its sufficient nourishment; it has not yet matured under the rays of experience, so that both materials and guidance are lacking for its precocious organising force. Superstitious minds are penetrating and narrow, deep and ignorant. They apply the higher categories before the lower—an inversion which in all spheres produces the worst and most pathetic disorganisation, because the lower functions are then deranged ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... a friend in Horace Greeley. He was born in 1811, in Amherst, Massachusetts, near the very cabin in which his forefathers had settled. God gave him a hungry mind, which literally consumed facts of nature and life. Not John Stuart Mill himself was more precocious than Horace Greeley. He was reading without difficulty at three years of age, and read any ordinary book at five. There never was an hour when he was not the best scholar in the little log schoolhouse, where he suffered ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... protection, 'little guessing what she was up to,' to use her own expression. Perhaps the girl had not earlier made out who Emily was, or she had been too much absorbed in her cares; but, as the three sat resting on a stump overlooking the hill, she was prompted by the singular inopportuneness of precocious fourteen to observe, 'I ought to have congratulated you, ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... contemplate a certain gingerbread man of lofty stature. It is a general, and it looks a little like Uncle Victor. I take it, I pay for it, and present it to the little pauper, who dares not extend his hand to receive it—for, by reason of precocious experience, he cannot believe in luck; he looks at me, in the same way that certain big dogs do, with the air of one saying, "You are cruel to make fun of ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... more beautiful than West Point; and as we drove up the hill under an arbour of trees, I saw that the buildings cleverly contrived to look old and grey and picturesque, like ours. The elms in a big green square past the top of the hill had a venerable air, too, so they must have been precocious about growing, for it doesn't stand to reason that West Point can be as ancient as Oxford or Eton. But anyway, the elms were there, making an effect that England couldn't improve on, and there were some grey stone barracks, and a long line of officers' quarters built of wood and brick. ...
— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... was heavy with moisture and very still and warm; a heady fragrance of precocious blooms flavoured the air, vying with the scent of rain. The silence was profound, but shaken now and then by a grumble of distant thunder. The world hung breathless on ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... of Nichols's Literary Anecdotes, "Memoirs of Mr. Gough," is the following anecdote of Mr. Gough's precocious talents— ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 67, February 8, 1851 • Various
... people watched up in the lonely church steeples by night to make them strike, and how the bells were rung when people died, and whether those were different bells from wedding-bells, or only sounded dismal in the fancies of the living; and then the precocious small boy proceeds to give the astonished clockmaker some useful information about ...
— Charles Dickens and Music • James T. Lightwood
... citizen of Brunai life opens under better auspices. The children are left much to themselves and are merry, precocious, naked little imps, able to look out for themselves at a very much earlier age than is the case with European infants, and it is wonderful to see quite little babies clambering up the rickety stairs leading from the river to the house, or crawling ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... worth gaining can be won without toil, so there are some things which can only be won by taking risks. Few things are less attractive in a boy than the habit of playing for safety; in the old prudence is natural and perhaps admirable, in the young it is precocious and unlovely. But we need not introduce unnecessary risk by the matching of boys of unequal size and age. The practice, for example, of house games in which the boys of one house play together, without regard to size or skill, is very ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... friend in these forbidden assemblies. The King heard the details of an orgy so unpardonable, and the precocious misconduct of his cherished son gave him so much pain, that I saw his tears fall. The assistant governor of the young criminal was dismissed; his valet de chambre was sent to prison; only three of his servants were retained, and he himself was subjected to a state of penitence which included general ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... one, surely. Frost kills the flowers that blossom out of season; And these precocious intellects portend A life of sorrow or an ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... Meanwhile the lad, a precocious fourteen-year-old cabin-boy from the Hydra, pointed to the boat which lay ready, and took Ledscha's bundle in his hand; but she sprang into the light skiff before him and ordered it to be rowed to the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... of Thomas Moore was shown at a very early period of life—in his thirteenth year he contributed to the Dublin periodicals. He was at that time under the care of a very celebrated schoolmaster, Mr. Samuel Whyte, who took a deep interest in the precocious genius of his pupil, and had no small share of honour in bringing him into notice. As early as fourteen years of age he entered the Dublin University. He was scarcely more than a year a pupil in the university when he published a paraphrase ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... me at the same time to a smile "de sa facon." Beautiful as Pauline Borghese, she looked at the moment scarcely purer than Lucrece de Borgia. Caroline was of noble family. I heard her lady-mother's character afterwards, and then I ceased to wonder at the precocious accomplishments of the daughter. These three, I at once saw, deemed themselves the queens of the school, and conceived that by their splendour they threw all the rest into the shade. In less than five minutes they had thus ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... a pink little thing, laid down the pen he had snatched up as I entered the room, and began gazing at me quizzically through enormous tortoise-shell-rimmed goggles, after the fashion of a precocious infant who tries to look like daddy. What might he do ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... to form her character, upon which the development of physical beauty so often depends. At her first debut into society at Charleston, in her fourteenth year—an age that would have been considered premature, but for the rapidity with which form and intellect are known to ripen in that precocious climate—she had received, but listened with indifference to the vapid compliments of men whose shallowness she was not slow to detect, and whose homage conveyed rather a fulsome tribute to her mere personal beauty, than a correct appreciation of her ...
— Hardscrabble - The Fall of Chicago: A Tale of Indian Warfare • John Richardson
... senator reached out his hand and took the lavender piece. He did not eat it, however, for, chancing to remember that it might spoil his dinner, he put it in his vest pocket. Mrs. Bostwick, still intently listening to her precocious daughter, without thinking what she did, took the remaining piece, which was the white one, and slowly ...
— American Fairy Tales • L. Frank Baum
... boldly chimed in little Jack, a precocious and manly little fellow of seven, who very much resembled his mother; "for if he was dead he could not beat you and thump us until we were black and blue, mother. And he would not eat up everything from us, and drive us ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... consent. "Really!" they exclaimed, "this isn't our Pao-yue. But his looks too are spruce and nice; and he is as precocious too with ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... Bensusan was a girl of seventeen, who had a local fame in the neighbourhood on account of her sharp tongue and many precocious qualities. No one knew who her parents were, or where the fat landlady had picked her up; but she had been in the Jersey Street house some ten years, and had been educated and—in a manner—adopted by its mistress, although Mrs. Bensusan always gave ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... Tobe as he held out the pan to Mrs. Sniffer and thus coaxed her from the side of Rose Mary and the small family. And, sure enough, around squirmed every little white and yellow bunch and up went every little new-born nose as it sniffed at the recession of the maternal fount. One little precocious even went so far as to attempt to set his wee fore paddies against Rose Mary's knee and to stiffen a tiny plume of a tail, with a plain instinct to point the direction of the shifting base of supplies. Rose Mary gave a cry ...
— Rose of Old Harpeth • Maria Thompson Daviess
... Borrow in Ireland with his father, mother, and brother. George is still a child, but he is precocious enough to be learning the language, and thus laying the foundation of his interest in little-known tongues. John is now an ensign in his father's regiment. 'Ah! he was a sweet being, that boy soldier, a plant of early promise, bidding fair to ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... forethought is necessary lest the brain be too early over-strained, and lest, in consequence of such precocious and excessive action, the foundation for a morbid excitation of the whole nervous system be laid, which may easily lead to effeminate and voluptuous reveries, and to brooding over obscene representations. The excessive reading of novels, whose exciting pages delight in painting the love of ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... more than ten years old. Before Byron had attained that age, he describes himself as having felt the passion. Dante is said as early as nine years old to have fallen in love with Beatrice; Alfieri, who was himself precocious in the passion, considered such early sensibility to be an unerring sign of a soul formed for the fine arts; and Canova used to say that he was in love when but five years old. But these instances, however, prove nothing. Calf-love, as it is called in the country, is common; and in Italy ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... companionship of his relations; now he had it in perfection. For every word that he said appreciative laughter was ready—it really sparkled round him. When he disagreed with prevailing tastes, prejudices, and morals, they disagreed too. When his precocious intelligence burst upon them, they were always ready to applaud. They even met him half-way—they could foresee the direction of his thoughts. As he was young in years and disposition, and at the same time knew more than most young people, he suited both old and ...
— Absalom's Hair • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... some excuse, left the room. She could feel her face growing hot, and Mabel had unusually keen eyes and precocious powers of deduction. A suspicion which had troubled her more than Gerald's conduct had lately crept into her mind, and it now thrust itself upon her attention; several things pointed to the fact that her father had taken the same course her brother had done. She felt that had ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... exception) during the life of the plant. The affection cannot be cured by any change of treatment, and is propagated by layers, cuttings, &c., and perhaps even by seed. In contabescent plants the female organs are seldom affected, or merely become precocious in their development. The cause of this affection is doubtful, and is different in different cases. Until I read Gaertner's discussion I attributed it, as apparently did Herbert, to the unnatural treatment of the plants; but its permanence under changed conditions, ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... Marie was so precocious that she could not remember when she was unable to read. The first book she remembered reading was the Old and New Testament. Her early religious teaching was most sufficient, and was submitted to by a mind which, although practical and realistic, was always devout ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... consider, as on this day, whether it were possible to hasten this change, that is, whether it could be hastened without injury to the future development of the character; for undoubtedly, there is such, a thing in minds, as well as in bodies, as precocious growth; and although it is not so frequent as precocious growth in the body, nor by any means so generally regarded as an evil, yet it is really a thing to be deprecated; and we ought not to adopt such measures as might ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... the dauphin, and directed various questions to him, in order to convince themselves about his precocious understanding that was ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... in her grave in Abbotshall Kirkyard these fifty and more years? We may of her cleverness,—not of her affectionateness, her nature. What a picture the animosa infans gives us of herself,—her vivacity, her passionateness, her precocious love-making, her passion for nature, for swine, for all living things, her reading, her turn for expression, her satire, her frankness, her little sins and rages, her great repentances! We don't wonder Walter Scott carried ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various
... The young are very precocious, and can soon be fed on nuts, and consequently taken from the mother, who remains in milk for a long time—nearly a year and ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... sorely missed in the home where he had been so tenderly cared for. Blackie was, as usual, wearing deep mourning, though he showed no emotional signs of feeling the absence of his master. Blackie, like many a precocious two-legged creature, had not developed into the wonder that was expected. Example and daily association had made him more and more like his fellows; and Nono had not been long away from the golden house before Jan began to talk about the ...
— The Golden House • Mrs. Woods Baker
... himself and me and all the rest of the world so seriously. I like him because he shares in my love for Dinkie and stands beside Peter himself in the fondly foolish belief that Dinkie has somewhere the hidden germ of greatness in him. Not that my boy is one of those precocious little bounders who are so precious in the eyes of their parents and so odious to the eyes of the rest of the world. He is a large-boned boy, almost a rugged-looking boy, and it is only I, knowing him as I do, who can fathom the sensibilities housed in that husky young body. There is a misty ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... in an arch in the wall; and on the steps of the altar, inside the railing for the communicants, an annoying statue was emerging from under a gilt canopy—the Infant Christ holding a globe in one hand, and raising the other as if to command attention; a statue of painted plaster as of some precocious mountebank, with homage offered in this deserted chapel, of two pots of hydrangea and a floating wick in ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... mother's side, since his father was of Italian birth. It is said also that somewhere in his ancestry there was a touch of the Oriental. At any rate, he was one of the most southern of the sons of southern France, and he showed the precocious maturity which belongs to a certain type of Italian. At twenty-one he had already been admitted to the French bar, and had drifted to Paris, where his audacity, his pushing nature, and his red-hot un-restraint of speech gave ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... felt she was detected, lacked courage to fight this man in the open, and so conceived the hope of strengthening her tottering empire by the arts of corruption and debauchery. She instilled by degrees into her pupil's mind the poison of vice, inflamed her youthful imagination with precocious desires, sowed in her heart the seeds of an unconquerable aversion for her husband, surrounded the poor child with abandoned women, and especially attached to her the beautiful and attractive Dona Cancha, who is branded ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - JOAN OF NAPLES—1343-1382 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... harmoniously with this profoundly illogical reasoner—Society. Government levies a conscription on the young intelligence of the kingdom at the age of seventeen or eighteen, a conscription of precocious power. Great ability is prematurely exhausted by excessive brain work before it is sent up to be submitted to a process of selection. Nurserymen sort and select seeds in much the same way. To this process the Government brings professional appraisers of talent, men who can assay ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... to the old man's lap over the bent back of the ordinary seaman who sat at Singleton's feet. Young Charley was lean and long-necked. The ridge of his backbone made a chain of small hills under the old shirt. His face of a street-boy—a face precocious, sagacious, and ironic, with deep downward folds on each side of the thin, wide mouth—hung low over his bony knees. He was learning to make a lanyard knot with a bit of an old rope. Small drops of perspiration stood out ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... imaginative conviction; and, when silence ensues, a wonder comes upon us as to where a young man of three-and-twenty acquired this knowledge of the various bitter tastes of life which belong to maturer experience, and how he had mastered such precocious worldly ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... equally the Father of Pittsburgh, for he came thither in November, 1753, and established the location of the now imperial city by choosing it as the best place for a fort. Washington was then twenty-one years old. He had by that time written his precocious one hundred and ten maxims of civility and good behavior; had declined to be a midshipman in the British navy; had made his only sea-voyage to Barbados; had surveyed the estates of Lord Fairfax, going for months into the forest without fear of savage Indians or wild beasts; and ...
— A Short History of Pittsburgh • Samuel Harden Church
... unclean. (Seriously.) But what is it, when all is said and done, but a violent protest on the part of the Teutonic people against the Romanesque spirit and school—a remarkable school, but not ours. To us it seems a barren, merely intellectual school—a mere mass of formulas which led to a precocious development of the mind. And that was the spirit it bred—critical and barren. But these schools of thought are now all we have, and both of them are bad for us! They have no use for the heart or the imagination; they do not breed faith or a longing for high achievement. ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... Filippino Lippi's chubby baby, placidly sucking his thumb as he looks out of the picture, is matched in the frolicsome boys of Andrea del Sarto's many paintings, smiling mischievously from the Madonna's arms. At the other extreme is the strangely precocious looking child of Botticelli, raising his eyes heavenward, with a mystic smile on his ...
— Child-life in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... this amazing equipment stop at batteries and bottles. The same little space a few feet square was soon converted by this precocious youth into a newspaper office. The outbreak of the Civil War gave a great stimulus to the demand for all newspapers, noticing which he became ambitious to publish a local journal of his own, devoted to the news of that section of the Grand Trunk road. A small ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... precocious the life which I bore, Which I drew sweetly in with each breath! The fulness of life did no more Than ripen a fruitage for death, Within ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... me. I outgrew toys very early and became precocious. Elderly ladies said I was "old for my age," whatever that may mean, and that I was too smart to live. But I have always had a stubborn way of disappointing those who love me best. This precocity was taken advantage of by relatives and visitors to furnish them with amusement. Many a time when ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... Frank Gresham. But there could hardly be two youths more different in their appearance. Louis, though his father and mother were both robust persons, was short and slight, and now of a sickly frame. Frank was a picture of health and strength; but, though manly in disposition, was by no means precocious either in appearance or manners. Louis Scatcherd looked as though he was four years the other's senior. He had been sent to Eton when he was fifteen, his father being under the impression that this was the most ready and best-recognised method of making him ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... woodwork, While between them are suspended Gorgeous tapestries and curtains: Scenes Arcadian boldly woven, Charmingly designed by Watteau.... In the place of stage, an arbor; Summer sun in place of footlights; Thus we rear Thalia's temple Where we play our private dramas, Gentle, saddening, precocious.... Comedies that we have suffered; Feelings drawn from past and present; Evil masked in pretty phrases; Soothing words and luring pictures; Subtle stirrings, mere nuances, ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... and as an admirable painter of children. His strange colouring and his gifts of grasping nature and of ingenuity—strangers to all decadent complexity—have allowed him to rank among the best of those who have expressed childhood in its true aspect, without overloading it with over-precocious thoughts. Finally, Renoir is a painter of flowers of dazzling variety and exquisite splendour. They supply him with inexhaustible pretexts for suave and ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... diaculum plaster off of Mr. Ekings the 'poarthecary?" said that young Michael Ragstroar, thrusting himself forward and others backward; because, you see, he was such a cheeky, precocious young vagabond. "Mean to say I can't buy twopenn'orth of diaculum plaster off of Mr. Ekings the 'poarthecary? Mean to say my aunt that orkupies a 'ouse in Chiswick clost to high-water mark don't send me to the 'poarthecaries just as often as not? For the mixture to be taken regular ... Ah!—where's ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... that the Rules contain no allusion whatever to the female sex. This alone proved, to my own mind, that Washington was in nowise responsible for these Rules. In the school he was attending when they were written there were girls; and, as he was rather precocious in his admirations, a compilation of his own could hardly omit all consideration of conduct towards ladies, or in their presence. There were other reasons also which led me to dissent from my friend Dr. Toner, ...
— George Washington's Rules of Civility - Traced to their Sources and Restored by Moncure D. Conway • Moncure D. Conway
... of a precocious genius who had written a concerted piece for flutes at thirteen, who was trying his wings on love songs at sixteen, and before he was twenty-one had composed several of the most famous of his American melodies, among ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... possible? All is deceit and perfidy. Geronimo seemed the soul of virtue and loyalty; he lived with so much economy and conducted himself so honorably, that to those who knew him not he might have appeared either a poor man or a precocious miser. And this tranquil, modest, prudent young man loses at the gaming-table ten thousand crowns, the property of his benefactor! His laudable course of conduct was but ...
— The Amulet • Hendrik Conscience
... very patient, and so very—(what's the word for a child that knows a deal more than he has any business to know at his age? Stop! I've got it!—precocious—that's the word)—so very patient and so very precocious that they will sit quiet in the same place for two hours; making believe all the time that they understand every word of the service, whether they really do or not. I don't deny that there may be such children, though I never ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... young. And her way of listening and answering made me suspect that she was but too used to such querulousness. I was perhaps too young to understand mainsprings of action, yet nevertheless I seemed to know at once that her calm, mature manner and precocious imperiousness were the result of his weakness and wavering, of his selfish and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... the face of Mr. GEORGE RELPH as Kara, leader of the Samurai. But there were horrors, too; notably the senile amorousness of Zakkuri and the offensive little figure of It, his shadow—an interpolation in the bill of fare. A properly qualified dwarf I might have welcomed; but this precocious babe with the false moustache and the sham bald crown and the cynical giggle, who ought to have been in the nursery instead of serving his master with liquid stimulants and assisting in all sorts of wickedness, was a peculiarly nauseating ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 28, 1914 • Various
... origin of the precocious child who lay in the cradle. The stanza was taken down from Roberts's lips. But he could not say what was ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... elapsed before our ambulance train started for the front we paid a visit to the theatre, but we found the stage tenanted by a "Lilliputian Company," and it is always tiresome and distressing to watch precocious children of twelve aping their elders. One feels all the time that the whole performance scarcely rises above an exhibition of highly-trained cats or monkeys, and that the poor mites ought all to be in bed long ago. Nevertheless, this dreary theatre ...
— With Methuen's Column on an Ambulance Train • Ernest N. Bennett |
