"Swaddling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Mexican nation was still in its swaddling clothes. Its birth had hardly cost a pang; but its infancy, its childhood, and its youth, were to be attended with a series of convulsions, the fruits of the vicious seeds sown in the conception of the new State. By the pronunciamiento of a part of a regiment of the King's Creole troops the ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... clean-shaved galley-beggar?" cried the fiery dame, turning upon the archer. "Can I not speak with my own son but you must let your tongue clack? A soldier, quotha, and never a hair on his face. I have seen a better soldier with pap for food and swaddling ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... entered in their proper place in the imperial registry. "And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that Mary should be delivered, and she brought forth her first-born son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... my feet with steady hand, Among the crowding marvels on her face, Bidding me rise, and run a strong man's race; Swathed mo in circumstance's swaddling band; Fed me with her own self; then bade me stand MYself entire,—while she was but a place Hewn for my dwelling from the midst of space, A something better than HER sea or land. Nay, Earth! thou bearest ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... a villa on the slope of the sandy hill. Once I am away from the majestic influence of that store the original feeling of Port Elizabeth being rather a dreary place comes back upon me; but we drive all about—to the Park, which may be said to be in its swaddling-clothes as a park, and to the Botanic Gardens, where the culture of foreign and colonial flowers and shrubs is carried on under the chronic difficulties of too much sun and wind and too little water. Everywhere there is building going on—very modest building, it is true, with ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... forgets that you are regent, and have to hold the reins of government in the name of the illustrious imperial squaller, your son, since his imperial grace still remains in his swaddling-clothes, and has much less to do with state affairs than with many other ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... be watery vapour, capable of condensation or of dispersion, under proper conditions, afterwards to be prescribed and realized. As it is beautifully expressed in Job xxxviii., "When I made the cloud the garment thereof, and thick darkness a swaddling-band ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... bid adieu to these mountains for long—I hope for ever. I am very glad to quit Asia, the cradle of mankind, in which the understanding has remained till now in its swaddling-clothes. Astonishing is the immobility of Asiatic life, in the course of so many centuries. Against Asia all attempts of improvement and civilization have broken like waves; it seems not to belong to time, but to place. The Indian Brahmin, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... of Sanuki, in the year 774. He is better known by his posthumous title K[o]b[o] Daishi, or the Great Teacher who promulgates the Law. By this name we shall call him. About his birth, life and death, have multiplied the usual swaddling bands of Japanese legend and tradition,[10] and to his tomb at the temple on Mount K[o]-ya, the Campo Santo of Japanese Buddhism, still gather innumerable pilgrims. The "hall of ten thousand lamps," each flame emblematic of the Wisdom that saves, is not, indeed, in these days ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... is a powerful passage, relating to original sin. Whoever weakens its force, goes straying like the blind man in the sunlight, failing to see his own acts and experiences. Look at the days of our swaddling clothes; in how many ways sin manifests itself in our earlier years. What an amount of switching it requires until we are taught order, as it ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... village or, if they were too high and mighty for this simple measure to satisfy them, they could indulge in the more grandiose performance of residing in the county seat. But nowadays our people want more. Rich or poor, tall or dumpy, tottering grandmothers or babies in swaddling-clothes, they long for ampler pastures. Their brawny arms or hoary heads must bedeck nothing less than the metropolis itself, and perchance put shoulders to the wheel in the incessant grind of the urban treadmill. Can you beat it? Unquestioned profit does not attend the ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... a manchet of fresh bread, a pasty, and a stoup of wine into a basket, and sent it by her husband, Gervas, after their master; and then eagerly assisted her mistress in coaxing the infant to swallow food, and in removing the soaked swaddling clothes which the captain and his crew had not dared ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... knees beside a chest of drawers, and unwrapping it from swaddling-clothes, she withdrew what at best had been a sorry sort of fiddle. Cracked of back and solitary of string it was as if her trembling arms, raising it above her head, would make of themselves and her swaying body the ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... entered into his life-work, there have been many remarkable instances in which it has seemed little less than prophecy, and it is deemed worth while to digress to the extent of relating two of them. One day in the summer of 1881, when the incandescent lamp-industry was still in swaddling clothes, Edison was seated in the room of Major Eaton, vice-president of the Edison Electric Light Company, talking over business matters, when Mr. Upton came in from the lamp factory at Menlo Park, and said: "Well, Mr. Edison, we completed a thousand ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... From the swaddling clothes of the risen grannom, cast thus upon the surface of the water by the insect made perfect, Halford turned to the artificial imitations then in use. They were of importance in those days, for ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... aurochs sufficed for rougher use, but from what had once been the clothes of the fawn, the weasel, the rabbit, and the ermine, garments were made that were smooth enough to suit a baby's tender flesh. The forest folk wrapped their infants in swaddling hands made of these dressed pelts. After feeding the darling, a mother hung her baby up, warmly covered, to a tree branch. The cradle, which was a furry bag, was made of the same material and swung in ...
— Dutch Fairy Tales for Young Folks • William Elliot Griffis
... Judah's land, The dreaded infant's hand; The rays of Bethlehem blind his dusky eyn. Nor all the gods beside Longer dare abide— Not Typhon huge, ending in snaky twine: Our babe, to show his Godhead true, Can in his swaddling ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... London. But among the poor, and even some of the bourgeois class, the old insane customs prevail, and it is not surprising to hear that the death-rate among infants is extraordinarily high. From its birth the poor child is tightly wrapped in swaddling clothes, confining all its limbs, so that it presents the appearance of a mummy, swathed in coarse yellow flannel, only its head appearing. So stiffly are they rolled up that I have seen an infant only a few weeks old propped up on end against ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... cargoes, rendezvoused at Havana, and sailed from thence to Europe. Such was the stinted, fettered and restricted commerce which subsisted between Spain and her possessions in America for more than two centuries and a half, and such were the swaddling clothes which bound the youthful limbs of the Spanish colonies, retarding their growth and keeping them in a condition of abject dependence. The effect was most injurious to Spain as well as to the colonies. The naval ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... we inquire for the basis of this opinion, we find little or none. It is a dogma repeated and received without proof, like that which, for thousands of years, insisted on swaddling-clothes. Very probably for the infant's stomach, not yet endowed with much muscular power, meat, which requires considerable trituration before it can be made into chyme, is an unfit aliment. But this ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... the Almighty Artist fram'd the sky, Or gave the earth its harmony, His first command was for thy light; He view'd the lovely birth, and blessed it: In purple swaddling bands it struggling lay, Old Chaos then a chearful smile put on, And from thy beauteous form did ...
— A Poetical Review of the Literary and Moral Character of the late Samuel Johnson (1786) • John Courtenay
... this? The truth is, our poor friend has only been "taking his turn," arranging "in fancy" the diaper of the royal nursery. That he should have selected a copy of the Athenaeum as a type of the swaddling cloth bespeaks in our mind the presence of great judgment. It is ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, December 11, 1841 • Various
... legends analogous to the pagan legends of the births of heroes, false and absurd legends, did gather round the infancy of Jesus Christ. The Apocryphal Gospels are full of such legends. They tell us how the idols of Egypt fell down before Him; how His swaddling-clothes worked miracles; and how He made clay birds and turned boys into kids, and worked other absurd miracles of various kinds. But there is a world of difference between these "silly tales" ...
— The Virgin-Birth of Our Lord - A paper read (in substance) before the confraternity of the Holy - Trinity at Cambridge • B. W. Randolph
... progress they are invaluable expedients for overcoming the rigidity of law, and, indeed, without one of them, the Fiction of Adoption which permits the family tie to be artificially created, it is difficult to understand how society would ever have escaped from its swaddling clothes, and taken its first steps towards civilisation. We must, therefore, not suffer ourselves to be affected by the ridicule which Bentham pours on legal fictions wherever he meets them. To revile them as merely fraudulent is ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... Hale who first found a use for our superfluous baby. She came to Dover Street several times to study our tiny Celia, in swaddling clothes improvised by my mother, after the fashion of the old country. Miss Hale wanted a baby for a picture of the Nativity which she was doing for her father's church; and of all the babies in Boston, our Celia, our little Jewish Celia, was posing ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... shrill cries rousing me o' nights, And many and unprofitable toils For me who bore them. For one needs must rear The heedless infant like an animal, (How can it else be?) as his humor serve For while a child is yet in swaddling clothes, It speaketh not, if either hunger comes, Or passing thirst, or lower calls of need; And children's stomach works its own content. And I, though I foresaw this, call to mind, How I was ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... time so trying, so full of agony to the soul, as is that hour when it first begins to doubt the absolute, unquestionable truth of the creeds it has hitherto blindly accepted, and in which it has fully believed. Creeds are the swaddling clothes of the soul, and must inevitably be outgrown and laid aside as the mind of man grows more and more capable of comprehending the truth which is to set it free from the ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... the fountain named after the rout which this same Count, when he afterwards grew up, inflicted upon the enemies of the valley in 1377; wherefore he is seen in an old picture of those times as a child in swaddling-clothes in the mouth of a wolf, and he gave the name of Fassola di S. Maiolo to his descendants. Nor, as in private duty bound, can the worthy ...
— Ex Voto • Samuel Butler
... doff the wind-wreath, find thee lone? Put on meek age's hood? Feel but the frost within the dawn? Wrap courage in a swaddling mood? His bare throat flings All-powered nay; The world, his vast, unfingered lyre, Stirs in her thousand strings; Lit with redemptive flame Burns miracle desire, And dedicated day Is long as ...
— Path Flower and Other Verses • Olive T. Dargan
... winter now doth lye In swaddling Clouts, like new born Infancy Bound up with frosts, and furr'd with hail & snows, And like an Infant, still it taller grows; December is my first, and now the Sun To th' Southward Tropick, his swift race doth run: ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... Power and the Party out of Power could do nothing but mend and patch, and revamp and cleanse and scour, and occasionally, in the wildness of despair, suggest even the cutting off the rebellious limbs that persisted in growing beyond the swaddling clothes of ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... that the children were to be killed, being under much fear, took the child, and wrapped him up in swaddling clothes, and laid him in an ox-manger, because there was no room for ...
— The Forbidden Gospels and Epistles, Complete • Archbishop Wake
... Chelsea Old Church. The inscription bears date 1605. On the north side of the chancel is a large monument to Sir Thomas Smith, died November 28, 1609. Opposite is that of Lady Margaret Legh, who is represented life-size dressed in stiff ruff and farthingale, holding an infant in swaddling bands on her knee. Another infant in swaddling bands is on her left side. Over her is an arch supported by pillars. The coat of arms of her family rests in the centre of the arch. She died July 3, 1603. The monument has been very much admired. In the southern aisle is the organ, with handsomely ...
— Hammersmith, Fulham and Putney - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... faster or farther than he could carry Germany, especially the nobility, with him. He was, in a very real sense, a child of his time, a product of medieval Europe, and he never succeeded in liberating himself from the tight swaddling-bands in which his youth was wrapped. He could not comprehend, as we shall see, the bold spirits who were dedicated to the task of reinterpreting Christianity in terms of the new age; he loved the old, in so far as it seemed ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... fruit of a foregoing education, a moral education, which presupposes a liberating religion. To preach liberalism to a population jesuitized by education, is to press the pleasures of dancing upon a man who has lost a leg. How is it possible for a child who has never been out of swaddling clothes to walk? How can the abdication of individual conscience lead to the government of individual conscience? To be free, is to guide one's self, to have attained one's majority, to be emancipated, master of ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and threats that, if she should become a Huguenot, the like fate would befall her. And a crowd of boys, between nine and ten years of age, was seen dragging through the streets the body of a babe yet in its swaddling-clothes, which they had fastened to a rope by means of a belt tied ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... out its allotted years on earth in bitter carping and blasphemous dissatisfaction. The Greeks recognized this immemorial truth— wrapped it in classic traditions, and the myth of Tantalus constituted its swaddling-clothes. You are a scholar, Mr. Murray; look back and analyze the derivation and significance of that fable. Tantalus, the son of Pluto, or Wealth, was, according to Pindar, 'a wanderer from happiness,' ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... filled with stories about the pursuit and slaughter of unoffending animals, of war and of murder, and of those questionable practices whereby a hero is enriched and others are impoverished. Before he is out of his swaddling-cloth the modern youngster is convinced that the one noble purpose in life is to get, get, get, and keep on getting of worldly material. The fairy tale is tabooed because, as the sordid parent alleges, ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... is first cloudily conceived in the mind; during the period of gestation it stands more clearly forward from these swaddling mists, puts on expressive lineaments, and becomes at length that most faultless, but also, alas! that incommunicable product of the human mind, a perfected design. On the approach to execution all is changed. The artist must now step down, don his working clothes, and become the artisan. He now ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and fish-ponds; I wonder how you that are a man that knows the world, can talk with that simple fellow. He has been my bubble these twenty years, and to my certain knowledge, understands no more of his own affairs than a child in swaddling clothes. I know he has got a sort of a pragmatical silly jade of a wife, that pretends to take him out of my hands; but you and she both will find yourselves mistaken; I'll find those that shall manage her; and for him, he dares as well be hanged as ...
— The History of John Bull • John Arbuthnot
... unable to walk, the Hurons made a kind of basket, similar to that in which they carried their wounded. In this he was so crowded into a heap, and bound and pinioned, that it was as impossible for him to move "as it would be for an infant in his swaddling clothes". This treatment caused him considerable pain after he had been carried for some days; in fact he suffered agonies while fastened in this way on to the ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... system.[219] So the Hindoo astronomy is now consigned to the same tomb with the Hindoo chronology and cosmogony, except when a missionary, on the banks of the Ganges, exhibits it to the pupils of his English school, as a specimen of the falsehoods which have formed the swaddling bands ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... persuading its mother not to put a cap upon it. I bribed her finally, by the promise of a pair of socks instead, with which I undertook to endow her child, and, moreover, actually prevailed upon her to forego the usual swaddling and swathing process, and let her poor baby be dressed at its first entrance into life as I assured ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... forth with cumbersome pieces of furnishing, my lady lay in a gloomy, canopied bed, with her new-born child at her side, but not looking at or touching it, seeming rather to have withdrawn herself from the pillow on which it lay in its swaddling-clothes. ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... superstitious worship which is now obsolete. The charred remains of it, placed under the pillow or under the house, preserved the house from storms, and before it was burned the Virgin used to come and sit on it, invisible, swaddling the infant Jesus. At Nouzon, twenty years ago, the traditional log was brought into the kitchen on Christmas Eve, and the grandmother, with a sprig of box in her hand, sprinkled the log with holy water as soon as the ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... name, bringing to you, in the green of her garlands, and the white of her hawthorn, the unrecognized symbols of the pastures and the wreathed snows of Arcadia, where long ago she was queen of stars: there, first cradled and wrapt in swaddling-clothes; then raised, in a moment of surprise, into his wandering power,—is born the shepherd of the clouds, winged-footed and deceiving,—blinding the eyes of Argus,—escaping from the grasp of Apollo—restless messenger between ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... labour, in the semicircle of the window (inscribed Roboam, Abias) to the lean and slippered pantaloon, who needs a stick to help him rise from his seat (over the window inscribed Salmon, Boaz, Obeth); there is the happy mother sleeping with her infant wrapped in swaddling-clothes (Salmon, Boaz, Obeth); and the old man playing with the children, (Eleazr, Matthew); the student attentively poring over his book regardless of the female figure, possibly Inspiration, speaking to him from the other side of the window (Naason). These figures, the Ancestors of Christ, are ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... Sigurd stirred by his glory, and he strove with the swaddling of Death; He turned in the pit on the highway, and the grave of the Glittering Heath; He laughed and smote with the laughter and thrust up over his head. And smote the venom asunder, and clave the heart of Dread; Then he leapt from the pit and the grave, and the rushing river ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... went on, 'at the commencement, our national destiny became a thing dominated by the philosophy of humanitarianism. When we had shed our swaddling-clothes and taken form as a people, the issue of the North and the South began to rise. Because of his realisation of the part America had to play in human affairs, Lincoln, the great-hearted Lincoln, said we must have war. Against the counsel of his Cabinet, loathing everything ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... himself upon a strenuous period, or upon interests with which his character little fitted him to deal. The last of the name had reigned, therefore, before the Kingdom of England got out of its national and religious swaddling clothes; before the reign of Henry VIII. had freed it from connection with Rome, or that of Elizabeth had founded the maritime and commercial empire which, in time, was to create the mighty realm over which the new ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... a little label said, Inscribed upon the baby's swaddling clothes. By the hand him Fortune leads in age more staid; And Valour as a guide before him goes. An unknown band in sweeping vest arraid, With long descending locks, the tapestry shows, Deputed by Corvinus to desire The tender infant from his ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... her beauty and grace of person were lost in the clumsy swaddling of her makeshift costume, she seemed to be comfortable enough; and the rushing air, keen with the chill of that great altitude, moulded her wind-veil precisely to the exquisite contours of her face and stung her firm cheeks until they glowed ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... commanded to watch over his church, and govern his spiritual kingdom, have sufficient authority and power from him so to do, which no Christian king nor prince should controul or discharge, but assist and support, otherwise they are not faithful subjects to Christ; and, Sire, when you was in your swaddling clothes, Christ reigned freely in this land; in spight of all his enemies, his officers and ministers were conveened for ruling his church, which was ever for your welfare, &c. Will you now challenge Christ's servants, ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... for aught I know, may, like Mr. Pitt, be half ripe before others are in blossom; but at Twickenham, I am sure, I could find dates and pomegranates on the quickset hedges, as soon as a cherry in swaddling-clothes on my walls. The very leaves on the horse-chestnuts are little snotty-nosed things, that cry and are afraid of the north-wind, and cling to the bough as if old poker was coming to take them away. For ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... from his swaddling-clothes when his father, with that restlessness peculiar to exiles, removed the whole family from Arezzo to Pisa. There they stayed for about two years; and the little fellow's first tottering, baby ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... unmindful of the rain still falling, and before the eavesdroppers realized it, she was speeding down the hill, the long braids dangling over her shoulders, and her perpetual white dress soon climbing like a veritable swaddling cloth ...
— The Girl Scouts at Bellaire - Or Maid Mary's Awakening • Lilian C. McNamara Garis
... of the ground; this is Spring. It precedes the green and flowery spring, as mythology precedes regular poetry. I know of nothing more purgative of winter fumes and indigestions. It convinces me that Earth is still in her swaddling-clothes, and stretches forth baby fingers on every side. Fresh curls spring from the baldest brow. There is nothing inorganic. These foliaceous heaps lie along the bank like the slag of a furnace, showing that Nature is "in full blast" within. The earth is not a mere fragment ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... foolish ones right, I suppose is the proper verdict. But one is not indignant at the worship of their emperor by the Japanese: he is a real ruler, has power, and stands firmly upon divine right. The Japanese are yet children politically; but the English should be out of their swaddling-clothes, surely. ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... light garments and plunging into the water. The lake occupied an extinct crater, surrounded by four mountains unequally raised up—Tetufera, Urufaa, Purahu, and Terouotupo. It is half a mile long and a third wide, of curious shape, the banks making it appear in the dusk like a babe in swaddling-clothes with its arms outside the band. A great natural reservoir, fed by many subterranean springs, it gives birth to many others at the feet of the mountains, in Mataiea ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... Pleisthenes begot!" For that lies this man here; and all the plot Is mine, most righteously. For me, the third, When butchering my two brethren, Atreus spared And cast me with my broken sire that day, A little thing in swaddling clothes, away To exile; where I grew, and at the last Justice hath brought me home! Yea though outcast In a far land, mine arm hath reached this king; My brain, my hate, wrought all the counselling; And all is well. I have ...
— Agamemnon • Aeschylus
... Ross, was in the possession of the learned editors, and had been given by the fathers of the Scots College at Douay to Prince Edward Stuart, from whom it had, in some unspecified but doubtless extremely romantic manner (probably sewn in the swaddling clothes in which the Jolair Dhearg was consigned to Admiral O'Haloran) descended to Mr. John Sobieski Stuart. This venerable heraldic document appears, if one may judge by the review in the Quarterly, to have been well-deserving of publication, owing to the extremely new and ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... her virgin breast; She hid it not, she bared the breast Which suckled that divinest babe! Blessed, blessed were the breasts Which the Saviour infant kiss'd; And blessed, blessed was the mother Who wrapp'd his limbs in swaddling clothes, Singing placed him on her lap, Hung o'er him with her looks of love, And soothed him with a lulling motion. Blessed! for she shelter'd him From the damp and chilling air; Blessed, blessed! for she lay With such a bade in one blest bed, Close as babes and mothers lie! Blessed, blessed ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... tie anywhere. It has been my study to untie all the ties; and, by Jove, I have succeeded. Look at me here. I have got rid of the trammels pretty well,—haven't I?—have unshackled myself, and thrown off the paddings, and the wrappings, and the swaddling clothes. I have got rid of the conventionalities, and can look Nature straight in the face. I don't even want the Daily Record, Stanbury;—think ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... man went back to his chair. "You remember, as well as I, that we considered the problem of change—and laughed at it. I repeat, we're no longer in swaddling clothes." ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... in lieu of many months; and the population of our Pacific Coast is so considerable that there is no longer any danger of its being overrun by immigrants from the Far East. Is it not therefore a fair question whether the maintenance of these old restrictions is desirable or politic? Swaddling bands, necessary for the protection of an infant, are an impediment to a growing boy. That question can perhaps be best decided by ascertaining the general sentiment of our Pacific States. My impression is ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... where the passive prisoner stands, looking not unlike a mummy in its case. I have seen the picture of the Virgin and Child in some of the old illuminated missals, not unlike the figure of a papouse in its swaddling-clothes. ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... story, the story of the Holy Night. The mother and father had traveled a long way; and when they came to Bethlehem every place was taken so they found a bed in a cave. In the night a baby boy came to the mother, and she "wrapped Him in swaddling clothes, and laid Him in a manger, because there was no room for them in an inn. And there was in the same country shepherds abiding in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory ...
— The Children's Book of Celebrated Pictures • Lorinda Munson Bryant
... from the East," but simply says that certain "shepherds" of the same country, who kept watch over their flock by night, were visited by "the angel of the Lord," and told that they would find the Savior, Christ the Lord, just born at Bethlehem, the City of David, "wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger." Luke does not, as is generally supposed, represent Mary as confined in a stable because Joseph was too poor to pay for decent accommodation, but because "there was ...
— Arrows of Freethought • George W. Foote
... wench, miss, damsel, demoiselle; maid, maiden; virgin; hoyden. Adj. infantine^, infantile; puerile; boyish, girlish, childish, babyish, kittenish; baby; newborn, unfledged, new-fledged, callow. in the cradle, in swaddling clothes, in long clothes, in arms, in leading strings; at ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Rodolph call, who might have heal'd The wounds whereof fair Italy hath died, So that by others she revives but slowly, He, who with kindly visage comforts him, Sway'd in that country, where the water springs, That Moldaw's river to the Elbe, and Elbe Rolls to the ocean: Ottocar his name: Who in his swaddling clothes was of more worth Than Winceslaus his son, a bearded man, Pamper'd with rank luxuriousness and ease. And that one with the nose depress, who close In counsel seems with him of gentle look, Flying ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... the angel said unto them, Be not afraid; for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy which shall be to all the people: for there is born to you this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. And this is the sign unto you; Ye shall find a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, and lying in a manger. And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... Belisarius; (such a person the Romans call "domesticus." Now this Solomon was a eunuch, but it was not by the devising of man that he had suffered mutilation, but some accident which befell him while in swaddling clothes had imposed this lot upon him); and there were also Cyprian, Valerian, Martinus, Althias, John, Marcellus, and the Cyril whom I have mentioned above; and the commanders of the regular cavalry were Rufinus and Aigan, who were of the house of Belisarius, and Barbatus and Pappus, ...
— History of the Wars, Books III and IV (of 8) - The Vandalic War • Procopius
... canvas in the rear, some musicians, costumed as Brahmins, with spectacles on their noses, the better to decipher their score, fingered their brass instruments with a weary air, rocking them like infants in swaddling clothes. Actors in the garb of Indians, with painted cheeks, and legs encased in chocolate-colored bandages, were yawning, weary and flabby, and stretching themselves while awaiting the time for them ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... look upon the child only from the point of view of material well-being; but where this is concerned, their arrangements are admirable. My children must always be bare-legged and wear woollen socks. There shall be no swaddling nor bandages; on the other hand, they shall never be left alone. The helplessness of the French infant in its swaddling-bands means the liberty of the nurse—that is the whole explanation. A mother, who is really ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... the old civilization this will not seem true, for it is still in the swaddling clothes of its old inheritance; in the thoughts of the past, man and God, matter and spirit, finite and infinite have been so long divorced and separated that it will be found difficult to accept the union of ...
— Freedom Talks No. II • Julia Seton, M.D.
... perhaps of Calamis of shadowy fame, belongs to a phase of art still in grave-clothes or swaddling-bands, still strictly subordinate to religious or other purposes not immediately its own. It had scarcely to wait for the next generation to be superseded, and we need not wonder that but little of it remains. But that it was a widely ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... doubtful remains cannot fail to be examined is turned into positive disgust when, the guardians of the grotto at Bethlehem undertake to show the water wherein the infant Messiah was washed, the milk of the blessed Virgin his mother, the swaddling-clothes, the manger, and other particulars neither less ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... thus; If you behind you have not shut the door, Through which you came to us; If you no more like some fair dame I see Laugh, walk, be well and gay; If like a little soul you seem to me That fain would fly away— I'll deem that to this world, where oft are blent The pall and swaddling-band, You came but to depart—an angel sent To bear me ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... and blaspheme," he said, "all the gods in heaven, but the Babe that lay in Mary's lap, the Babe that lay in swaddling clothes." ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... has fairly leaped into prominence and apparently into full growth, but it still wears some of its swaddling-bands. Some of the garments which it borrowed from sister forms of construction in its short infancy still cling to it, and, while these were, perhaps, the best makeshifts under the circumstances, they fit badly and should be ...
— Some Mooted Questions in Reinforced Concrete Design • Edward Godfrey
... master might indeed have written the magnificent speech which ushers in with gradual rhetoric and splendid reticence the black suggestion of a deed without a name; his hand might have woven with no less imperial skill the elaborate raiment of words and images which wraps up in fold upon fold, as with swaddling- bands of purple and golden embroidery, the shapeless and miscreated birth of a murderous purpose that labours into light even while it loathes the light and itself; but only Shakespeare could give us the first sample of that more secret and terrible knowledge which reveals itself ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... of kings, when he was born, Had not so much for outward ease; By Him such dressings were not worn, Nor such like swaddling-clothes as these. Sweet baby, then forbear to weep; Be still, my ...
— Pastoral Poems by Nicholas Breton, - Selected Poetry by George Wither, and - Pastoral Poetry by William Browne (of Tavistock) • Nicholas Breton, George Wither, William Browne (of Tavistock)
... and pared and pinched myself all round,—very ineffectually, as I fear,—to fit myself for this thing. You have lived as free as air. You have disdained,—and though I may have grumbled I have still been proud to see you disdain,—to wrap yourself in the swaddling bandages of Court life. You have ridiculed all those who have been near her Majesty ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... feels from Juda's land The dreaded infant's hand— The rays of Bethlehem blind his dusky eyne; Nor all the gods beside Longer dare abide— Not Typhon huge, ending in snaky twine; Our babe, to show His God-head true, Can in His swaddling-bands control the damned crew. ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... make their homes her own. One of her eccentricities (and she had more than one,) was a passion for spinning on a little wheel. Its monotonous hum had long been the music of her lonely life; the distaff, with its swaddling bands of flax, the petted child of her affections, and the thread which she manufactured the means of her daily support. Wherever she went, her wheel preceded her, as an avant courier, after the fashion of the ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... of delight. If you think that there are no unsolved problems of the commonest insect life around us, say why it is that the moths and millers pass the winter wrapped in swaddling clothes of densest textures, roll upon roll of silken coverlets; while our delicate butterflies hang uncovered, suspended only by a single loop of silk, exposed to the cold blast of every northern gale? Why do the caterpillars of our giant moths—the mythologically named Cecropia, ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... an unheard-of commission, which he graciously accepted. The bargain concluded and the treaty signed, our traveller was put in training, or we might say weaned, by the secretary-general of the enterprise, who freed his mind of its swaddling-clothes, showed him the dark holes of the business, taught him its dialect, took the mechanism apart bit by bit, dissected for his instruction the particular public he was expected to gull, crammed him with phrases, fed him with impromptu ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... remarkable crisis Mary was detained by the full accomplishment of the time for her delivery; "and she brought forth her first born Son, and wrapped him in swaddling-clothes, and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn." Here then were fulfilled the prophetic descriptions of the place and circumstances of the Redeemer's incarnation. A virgin produces a son—a son who, by the exclusion ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... womanhood has never worn iron shoes, burned on the funeral pile, or skulked behind a mask in a harem, yet, though cradled in liberty, with the same keen sense of justice and equality that man has, she is still bound by law in the swaddling bands of an old barbarism. Though the world has been steadily advancing in political science, and step by step recognizing the rights of new classes, yet we stand to-day talking of precedents, authorities, laws, and constitutions, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... registered, each to his own town. Joseph, because he was of the family of David, went to be registered with Mary, his wife, from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Bethlehem in Judea where David was born. While they were there Mary's first son was born. And she wrapped him in swaddling-clothes and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them ...
— The Children's Bible • Henry A. Sherman
... to the men respecting their clothing. Whatever they can rake and scrape together they put on—swaddling themselves in old sails, and drawing old socks over their heads for night-caps. This is the time for smiting your chest with your hand, and talking loud to keep up ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... sang; And the year died out as the moments rolled, Still o'er its bier the joy-bells rang: 'Twas mourning an instant, merriment then, And the ghastly shroud where the old year lay— How like is the humour of bells and men— Became swaddling-clothes for the ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... in swaddling-clothes Far better he than bearded Winceslaus His son, who feeds in luxury ...
— Dante's Purgatory • Dante
... the pores of earth And make her spurt from open veins a juice Like unto milk; even as a woman now Is filled, at child-bearing, with the sweet milk, Because all that swift stream of aliment Is thither turned unto the mother-breasts. There earth would furnish to the children food; Warmth was their swaddling cloth, the grass their bed Abounding in soft down. Earth's newness then Would rouse no dour spells of the bitter cold, Nor extreme heats nor winds of mighty powers— For all things grow and gather strength through time In like proportions; ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... very young. Only yesterday it was in swaddling clothes. But today it is a vigorous young giant, well braced to battle for what it wants, and knowing precisely what it wants. It holds its international conventions, where world-policies are formulated by the representatives of millions of Socialists. In ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... answer," said Rastignac. "An incessant battle is going on—greater than common people who are not in it have any idea of—between power in its swaddling-clothes and power in its childhood. Power in swaddling-clothes is the Chamber of Deputies which, not being restrained by an ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... God weak! God fed by mortal woman! A God wrapt in swaddling clothes, and laid in a manger!—If that sight will not touch ...
— The Good News of God • Charles Kingsley
... strut, and thy great part rehearse; Ever the slave of every proud desire; Come now a little down where sports thy sire; Choose thy small better from thy abounding worse; Prove thou thy lordship who hadst dust for nurse, And for thy swaddling the primeval mire!" ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare
... and deplore, and that the rash and unquiet spirit of modern days cannot imitate. But mind has its rights from all eternity; mind will not be fettered by dogmas, or lulled to sleep by the ringing of a bell; mind has cast aside his swaddling-clothes, and broken the string by which his nurse (the Roman Church) held him, and, in the madness and intoxication of his holiday, has rounded the globe, has traversed all nations, has scaled the Himalayas, and, returning again to Mother Earth, has ...
— Notes in North Africa - Being a Guide to the Sportsman and Tourist in Algeria and Tunisia • W. G. Windham
... they fall into the gutter when they grow up," thought Bobbie. "They're sitting in it from the time they get out of their swaddling rags." ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball
... see in the morning in the anteroom my baby's little shoes standing proudly beside the paternal boots, I experience, despite myself, a return toward that past which is yet so near. Yesterday swaddling clothes, today boots, tomorrow spurs. Ah! how the happy days fly by. Already four years old. I can scarcely carry him, even supposing he allowed me to, for his manly dignity is ticklish. He passes half his life armed for war, his pistols, his guns, his whips and his swords are all over the place. ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... French call Montbeillard, in Alsace), a serene Grand-daughter of his, from whom come the Czars,—thanks to her or not. Prince Alexander is Ancestor withal of our present "Kings of Wurtemberg," if that mean anything: Father (what will mean something) to the serene Duke, still in swaddling-clothes, [Born 21st January, 1732; Carl Eugen the name of him (Michaelis, iii. 450).] who will be son-in-law to Princess Wilhelmina of Baireuth (could your Majesty foresee it); and will do strange ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... dictates of science, of unquestioning reliance on public spirit, public control, and public honesty—a time in which it was believed that the public would spontaneously do everything necessary for the common weal, if it were only freed from the administrative swaddling-clothes in which it had been hitherto bound. Still smarting from the severe regime of Nicholas, men thought more about protecting the rights of the individual than about preserving public order, and under the influence of the socialistic ideas ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... "pupa" or doll, was given to the creature in this stage, because long ago people thought the way in which insects are thus enclosed was somewhat like the way in which the babies used to be wrapped round in bandages or "swaddling clothes": it is also called a "chrysalis," because sometimes dotted with gold or pearly spots. But the wonder of it is that inside that narrow shell lies an insect quite unlike the caterpillar which lay down to rest; a creature with legs and wings ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... We have had to make our way against Indian savages, and did we not conquer the French in our mother's behalf? And then to be set down as ignorant children, forsooth, and told what we must do and from what we must refrain. The colonies have outgrown swaddling-clothes!" ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... of swaddling children? From an unnatural custom. Since the time when mothers, despising their first duty, no longer wish to nurse their own children at the breast, it has been necessary to intrust the little ones to hired women. These, finding themselves ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... caring for none of these things. Her hands were busy with the swaddling clothes. Her thoughts only for that wicker cradle which swung betwixt the pillars, where Hermippus's house looked ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... early and screened in the little birdhouse balcony. There was a large piece of netting left and Silvia converted it into a robe and headgear for the swaddling ...
— Our Next-Door Neighbors • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... of the discontent which was everywhere excited by the exorbitant increase of taxation, that Masaniello's wife was detained by the keepers of the gate while she was endeavoring to creep into the town with a bundle of flour done up in cloths to look like a child in swaddling-clothes. She was imprisoned, and her husband, who loved her much, only succeeded in obtaining her liberation after eight days. Almost the whole of his miserable goods went to pay the fine which had been imposed upon her. Thus hatred was smouldering in the mind of Masaniello, and the flame ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... a Hume or Bennet, Then sitting in the Thibet Senate, Ye Gods! what room for long debates Upon the Nursery Estimates! What cutting down of swaddling-clothes And pinafores, in nightly battles! What calls for papers to expose The waste of sugar-plums and rattles! But no—if Thibet had M.P.s, They were far better bred than these; Nor gave the slightest opposition, During the ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... thoroughly to appreciate. Yet something his heart felt, and something his soul perceived; his pale and vacant face was illumined; and at the close of the reading he rose up. The coarse wrappings of his body fell away; and the muffling ignorance, the swaddling dulness, wherein that divine infant, the bright immortal spirit, was confined, seemed also to fall off. He lifted up his hands, spreading them as if dispensing blessings; and his countenance had a vague, smiling wonder in it, almost beautiful, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... palm tree she cast her arms, and set her knees on the soft meadow, while earth beneath smiled, and forth leaped the babe to light, and all the Goddesses raised a cry. Then, great Phoebus, the Goddesses washed thee in fair water, holy and purely, and wound thee in white swaddling bands, delicate, new woven, with a golden girdle round thee. Nor did his mother suckle Apollo the golden-sworded, but Themis with immortal hands first touched his lips with nectar and sweet ambrosia, while Leto ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... pillars and inscribed upon parchment, but engraved upon the souls of the generations who through the ages maintain the chosen community. Children should take over the paternal customs from their parents as part of their inheritance, for they were reared on them, and lived on them from their swaddling days, and they should not neglect them merely because the tradition is not written. The man who obeys the written laws is not, indeed, worthy of praise, for he may be constrained thereto by fear of punishment. But he who holds fast to the unwritten laws gives proof ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... was ripe, Wahaska did presently burst its swaddling-bands. Commercial enterprise is sheep-like; where one leads, others will follow; and the mere following breeds success, if only by the sheer impetus of the massed forward movement. Jasper Grierson was the man ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... for pearl and gold, Tissues, or tabbies manifold: One only lock of that sweet hay Whereon the blessed baby lay, Or one poor swaddling-clout, shall be The ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... Phalansteriens! The lady of M. Jules Gondou, redacteur de l'Univers, of a horrid little Fourierist! The nursery of M. de Falloux in red pinafores, squalling out Soc.-de-moc. canticles! Never before such danger in swaddling clothes!" ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... that epileptic and weakly children faint and waste away upon their being thus bathed, while, on the contrary, those of a strong and vigorous habit acquire firmness and get a temper by it, like steel. There was much care and art, too, used by the nurses; they had no swaddling bands; the children grew up free and unconstrained in limb and form, and not dainty and fanciful about their food; not afraid in the dark, or of being left alone; without any peevishness or ill humor or crying. Upon this account, Spartan nurses were often ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... do with it? With these little swords" (waving his brush), "we'll fight for nature-light, truth light, and sunlight against a world in arms—no, worse, in swaddling clothes." ...
— Christie Johnstone • Charles Reade
... fashioned for battle with frost and storm. His very fire and roof he makes by his battling. I know. For three years, once, I knew never roof nor fire. I was sixteen, and a man, ere ever I wore woven cloth on my body. I was birthed in storm, after battle, and my swaddling cloth was a wolfskin. Look at me and see what manner of man ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... to Augustias—"What would they say of me in the club? What would people say of me, if they met me in the street with a woman on my arm, or if they found me at home, just about to feed a child in swaddling clothes? I—to have children? To worry about them? To live in eternal fear that they might fall sick or die? Augustias, believe me, as true as there is a God above us, I am absolutely unfit for it! I should behave in such a way that after a short while you would call upon heaven either ...
— First Love (Little Blue Book #1195) - And Other Fascinating Stories of Spanish Life • Various
... survive in me today? No. He is a stranger to me; I feel that I can love him without selfishness and weep for him without unmanliness. He is dead and gone, and has taken away with him my innocent simplicities and my boundless hopes. We all of us die in swaddling clothes. Little Marguerite, that delightful image of unfolding life, how many times has she not died and what profound depths of irrevocable memories, what a grave of dead thoughts and emotions has not already been delved within her, though she is but five years old. I, a stranger, ...
— Marguerite - 1921 • Anatole France
... and honours too what benefit are they? In swaddling clothes thou'lt be when parents pass away; The rays will slant, quick as the twinkle of an eye; The Hsiang stream will recede, the Ch'u ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... kerchiefs, their skinny fingers fumbling on the rosary, and their mute lips moving in prayer. The younger women have great listless eyes and large limbs used to labor. Some of them carry babies trussed up in tight swaddling-clothes. One kneels beside a dark-browed shepherd, on whose shoulder falls his shaggy hair; and little children play about, half hushed, half heedless of the place, among old men whose life has dwindled down into a ceaseless round of prayers. We wonder why this chapel, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... nature. Lay aside the swaddling-bands of your imperfections, conform your lives to the highest ideals of uprightness and truth. Exercise your voice, your articulation and your gestures. If need be, like Demosthenes, place pebbles in your mouth; repair like that great orator ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... always for a word of help his hand moved faithfully the unsteady symbols, a faint hue of shame flickering behind his dull skin. Amor matris: subjective and objective genitive. With her weak blood and wheysour milk she had fed him and hid from sight of others his swaddling bands. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... from an unlimited freedom of thought? At present, genius every where finds trammels; superstition invariably opposes itself to its course; man, straitened with bandages, scarcely enjoys the free use of any one of his faculties; his mind itself is cramped; it appears continually wrapped up in the swaddling clothes of infancy. The civil power, leagued with spiritual domination, appears only disposed to rule over brutalized slaves, shut up in a dark prison, where they reciprocally goad each other with the efferverscence of their mutual ill humour. Sovereigns, in general, detest liberty ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... state for a considerable time; but at length Madam de Luxembourg carried her goodness so far as to have a desire to take one of my children from the hospital. She knew I had put a cipher into the swaddling clothes of the eldest; she asked me for the counterpart of the cipher, and I gave it to her. In this research she employed La Roche, her valet de chambre and confidential servant, who made vain inquiries, although after only about twelve or ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... during the retreat, partly from his wounds, but even more from the mode of transportation. The Indian method of removing the wounded was first to bind and pinion them 'in such a manner that it is as impossible for them to move as for an infant in its swaddling-clothes.' They were then carried in a kind of basket, 'crowded up in a heap.' Doubtless as a mark of distinction, Champlain was carried separately on the back of a savage. His wound was so severe that when the retreat began he could not stand. But the transportation ...
— The Founder of New France - A Chronicle of Champlain • Charles W. Colby
... their delicate tongues, exposed to the sun, or carried quickly into the shade certain white balls which Piccolissima took at first for grains of wheat, because they had the form and size; but she was satisfied at last that these were the children of the ants in swaddling clothes. Piccolissima was so anxious to comprehend the mysterious talk, and the pantomime of all this innumerable crowd, that she became yet more attentive. The nurses caressed with their antennae in a peculiar way those eggs which ...
— Piccolissima • Eliza Lee Follen
... Papist, an atheist, a traitor, a miscreant, by the fanatics for the sacerdotal and personal power. Yet it was a pity that he could never contemplate the possibility of his country's throwing off the swaddling clothes of provincialism which had wrapped its infancy. Doubtless history, law, tradition, and usage pointed to the independent sovereignty of each province. Yet the period of the Truce was precisely ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... forth the fragments foul, On Pelops' house a deadly curse he spake? As darkly as I spurn this damned food, So perish all the race of Pleisthenes! Thus by that curse fell he whom here ye see, And I—who else?—this murder wove and planned; For me, an infant yet in swaddling bands, Of the three children youngest, Atreus sent To banishment by my sad father's side: But Justice brought me home once more, grown now To manhood's years; and stranger tho' I was, My right hand reached unto the chieftain's ...
— The House of Atreus • AEschylus
... of Gilles de Sille was still swathed in bandages when, with an additional swaddling of disguise across his eyes, he and Laurence, that truant scion of the house of O'Halloran, stole out into the night. A frosty chill had descended with the darkness, and a pale, dank mist from the marshes of the Seine made the pair shiver as arm in ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... lived so fast that at the age of twenty-three he was tired of life; his only anxiety was for the future of his son, whom he had confided to the care of a good woman named Marie Hamon. He traced out a line of conduct for this babe in swaddling clothes: "Let him flee corruption, seduction and all shameful and violent passions; let him be a friend as they were in ancient Greece, a lover as ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... have a few savings, "living on the herbage, and on a few goats which devour everything." Often again, these, by order of Parliament, are killed by the game-keepers. A woman, with two children in swaddling clothes, having no milk, "and without an inch of ground," whose two goats, her sole resource, had thus been slain, and another, with one goat slain in the same way, and who begs along with her boy, present themselves ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... how it came, or who bid it come, or whether it came purely of its own head, neither you nor I know—but there lay, sure enough, wrapped in its little cloudy swaddling bands—a ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... instead of hampering a great work of this kind the public ought to do everything in its power to assist it. It means giving a new metropolitan flavor to this down-town section. It is time Chicago was getting out of its swaddling clothes." ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... adapt it to the increasing vigor of the mind, in its progress from infancy to age. The progress of society depends on the exercise of this right. It is impossible that its powers should be developed, if it were to be forever wrapt up in its swaddling clothes, or coffined as a mummy. The early Christians submitted quietly to the unjust laws of their Pagan oppressors, until the mass of the community became Christians, and then they revolutionized the government. Protestants acted in the same way with their papal rulers. So did ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... man went back to his chair. "You remember, as well as I, that we considered the problem of change—and laughed at it. I repeat, we're no longer in swaddling clothes." ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... forth thy hand, nor yet in terror flee; Thick darkness but a swaddling-band shall be The waves and billows which thy way oppose Shall in their ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... tugging here and there, with his mandibles, at the fragile envelope, strives to deliver the female from her shackles. His efforts are soon crowned with success; and, though the female is still three parts swathed in her swaddling-bands, the coupling takes place immediately, lasting about a minute. During the act, the male remains motionless on the top of the shell, or on the top of the female when the latter is entirely free. I do not know whether, in ordinary circumstances, the male occasionally thus ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... infancy, and are tempted to supply the gap with Rabelais' chapters on Gargantua's babyhood. But regard for the truth compels us to add nothing that cannot fairly be deduced from the evidence. We leave the strapping boy in his swaddling-clothes to answer the question when he was born. Now, it is to be regretted that Falstaff, who was so precise about the hour of his birth, should not have mentioned the year. On this point we are again left to inference from ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... his mark so strongly on society in general. The difference begins at the very moment of his birth, or indeed even sooner. As much fuss is made over each young republican as if he were the heir to a long line of kings; his swaddling clothes might make a ducal infant jealous; the family physician thinks $100 or $150 a moderate fee for ushering him into the light of day. Ordinary milk is not good enough for him; sterilised milk will hardly do; "modified" milk alone is considered ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead |
