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Maidenhood   Listen
Maidenhood

noun
1.
The childhood of a girl.  Synonyms: girlhood, maidhood.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Maidenhood" Quotes from Famous Books



... before her that highly resplendent deity furnished with rays, viz., Surya himself. And beholding them all, the girl became frightened and her face was suffused with blushes of shame. And then she addressed Surya, saying, 'O lord of rays, go thou back to thy own region. On account of my maidenhood, this outrage of thine is fraught with woe to me! It is only one's father, mother, and other superiors, that are capable of giving away their daughter's body. Virtue I shall never sacrifice, seeing that in this world the keeping of ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... Morgan, though not at all a sentimental person, had hoarded up her ideal so much after the ordinary date, that it came all the harder upon her when everything thus merged into the light of common day. She walked very fast up Grange Lane, which was another habit of her maidenhood not quite in accord with the habit of sauntering acquired during the same period by the Fellow of All-Souls. When Mrs Morgan was opposite Mr Wodehouse's, she looked across with some interest, thinking of Lucy; and it shocked her greatly to see the closed shutters, which told of the presence ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant

... examining witnesses from Domremy, and the Queen of Sicily and other great ladies to whom Joan was entrusted, the clergy found nothing in her but 'goodness, humility, frank maidenhood, piety, honesty, and simplicity.' As for her wearing a man's dress, the Archbishop of Embrun said to the king, 'It is more becoming to do these things in man's gear, since they have to be ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various

... full clear doth pass, Without a break, through shining glass, Thy Maidenhood unblemished was For bearing of the Lord: Now, sweetest Comfort of our race, To ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry

... is spoken of as an emblem of hard things, as, to take a modern example, in Mr. Swinburne's "armed and iron maidenhood "— said of Atalanta. Hearts are "iron," strength is "iron," flesh is not "iron," an "iron" noise goes up to the heaven of bronze. It may not follow, Cauer thinks, from these phrases that iron was used in any way. Men are supposed ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang

... beautiful in her proud, flashing maidenhood; and Bertram felt, as he looked on her handsome, glowing countenance, that he had never loved her so sincerely, and at the same time so painfully, ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach

... inquirers, was always a matter of interest to the residents of the Hotel Winchester. They were an extremely picturesque pair to the eye seeking for romance and color. The child had the pure, clear cut features of the cameo type of New England maidenhood. She was always dressed in some striking combination of blue, deep blue like her eyes, with blue hair ribbons. Her good-looking young relative, with hair almost as near the color of the sun as her own, seemed to be entirely devoted to her, which, considering the charm ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley

... many periods of the past which history leaves in darkness, and tradition tells how this colony found among friendly Indians a refuge from the dangers of Roanoak Island, and how this infant grew into fair maidenhood, and was changed by the sorcery of a rejected lover into a white doe, which roamed the lonely island and bore a charmed life, and how finally true love triumphed over magic and restored her to human form,—only to result in the death of the maiden from ...
— The White Doe - The Fate of Virginia Dare • Sallie Southall Cotten

... her back like a person wrapped in profound and undisturbed slumber. Carefully managing my advance, as if I were afraid of waking her up, I begin by gently gratifying her senses, and I ascertain the delightful fact that, like her sister, she is still in possession of her maidenhood. As soon as a natural movement proves to me that love accepts the offering, I take my measures to consummate the sacrifice. At that moment, giving way suddenly to the violence of her feelings, and tired of her assumed dissimulation, she warmly locks me in her arms at the very instant of ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... disturbing eloquence of his eyes, she discovered the presence of his encircling arm. The discovery brought her to her feet—flushed, palpitating, aquiver with anger at this first shadow of insult to her maidenhood. ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver

... young maidenhood made itself master of this old man and subdued him, for in the name of the sweet face of Venus, Blanche, endowed with the natural artfulness of women, made her old Bruyn come and go like a ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac

... All other beauties vanish from our sight. No need for her to fear 'the world's rebuff! Too much of Marie's always just enough I She is 'bad company,' yet e'en 'the good' Can find no flaw in her fair maidenhood. The saints don't doubt that she is in their fold— It makes me laugh to think how they are 'sold.' Nice, naughty folks are sure, she's of their creed, Yet she's no hypocrite, in word or deed. What is she, then—this gem without a ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... father's heart with proud desire Of bold-faced victory. Then leaden age, Quicken'd with youthful spleen and warlike rage, Beat down Alencon, Orleans, Burgundy, And from the pride of Gallia rescued thee. The ireful bastard Orleans, that drew blood From thee, my boy, and had the maidenhood Of thy first fight, I soon encountered, And interchanging blows I quickly shed Some of his bastard blood; and in disgrace Bespoke him thus; 'Contaminated base And misbegotten blood I spill of thine, Mean and right ...
— King Henry VI, First Part • William Shakespeare [Aldus edition]

... and sorrow may follow fast; fears and misgivings and dread discoveries may come close upon thy train; broken-heartedness and bleak perpetual maidenhood may be thine only relics; or, flowering with the years, the thorns of grief and poverty and widowhood may grow where youthful fancy looked for radiant flowers; the heart which echoed with thy bridal song may yet peal forth ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles

... feeling, of late, that life was too complex an affair for him to grapple with. Now, as by a flash, order was restored in his chaotic universe. He stood gazing in rapture at Miss Jones's blushing face, which seemed angelic in its purity and its dignified maidenhood. That there dwelt a sweet young soul behind those blameless features ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various

... empty skies And dies away, like echo of old age Sighing and dying in the heart that fails. Ah! the cruel beauty ... how it creeps Into my home, into my waiting heart! Who am I that I wait to-night?... Alas, Where is the old content of maidenhood, The calmness and the laughter and the song, The patient hands unshaken as the needle Plied to the gentle rhythm that my lips Murmured, untroubled girlhood at ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various

... him his power over unsophisticated maidenhood—a power which seemed sometimes to have a touch of the weird and wizardly in it. Personally he was not ill-favoured, though rather un- English, his complexion being a rich olive, his rank hair dark and rather clammy—made still clammier by secret ointments, which, ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy

... practical side, and chooses to admit literature for actual reading, to have two cases, one for Books, the other for Bibliographical Simulacra. For it is not for one till he has graduated to lay his prentice fingers on a tome in the pristine mutton, or to endanger the maidenhood of a Clovis Eve, a Padeloup, or a Derome, which you must handle as if it were the choicest and daintiest proof medal or etching. Why, one has to bear in mind that he is not dealing with a mere ordinary source of intellectual gratification and improvement, but with a mechanical ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt

... prayer.... They come into a house: they are all strife And hate to any child of the dead wife.... Better a serpent than a stepmother! A boy is safe. He has his father there To guard him. But a little girl! (Taking the LITTLE GIRL to her) What good And gentle care will guide thy maidenhood? What woman wilt thou find at father's side? One evil word from her, just when the tide Of youth is full, would wreck thy hope of love. And no more mother near, to stand above Thy marriage-bed, nor comfort ...
— Alcestis • Euripides

... past thirty-five, and had no regrets. She was a close student of the Bible, and brought one text from it into her own life. "When I was a child I played as a child, but now that I am old I have put aside childish things." She often quoted this in defence of her industrious maidenhood. ...
— Nancy McVeigh of the Monk Road • R. Henry Mainer

... is the promise of what she will be in the careless school-girl, that makes her attractive, the undeveloped maidenhood, or the mere natural, careless sweetness of childhood. If Laura at twelve was beginning to be a beauty, the thought of it had never entered her head. No, indeed. Her mind wad filled with more important thoughts. To her simple school-girl dress ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 1. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner

... his wife were on the most intimate terms with my relatives, and their daughter Lina seemed to me the fairest of all the flowers in the Adelsson garden. If ever a girl could be compared to a violet it was she. I knew her from childhood to maidenhood, and rejoiced when I saw her wed in young Count Uexkyll-Guldenbrand a ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... the preceding volumes of this history, as the famous chronicler of Abbotsford has recorded them, can doubt for a moment what was the result of the marriage between Sir Wilfrid of Ivanhoe and Lady Rowena. Those who have marked her conduct during her maidenhood, her distinguished politeness, her spotless modesty of demeanor, her unalterable coolness under all circumstances, and her lofty and gentlewomanlike bearing, must be sure that her married conduct would equal her spinster behavior, and that Rowena the wife would be a pattern ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray

... the sunshine of official favor illumined his daily life; he had a fund of anecdote and table talk; his guests were responsive and full of appreciation of the entertainment provided for them. Nellie, in her shy maidenhood, was a lovely picture at the head of his board; and Holmes, who sat at her left, was evidently more impressed than ever. A son-in-law like that, rich, manly, and educated, a leader of affairs in the city where he made his home,—the ...
— 'Laramie;' - or, The Queen of Bedlam. • Charles King

... general opinion. That she showed few positive qualities was true. The colours and tones which changing events paint on the faces of active womankind were looked for in vain upon hers. But still waters run deep; and no crisis had come in the years of her early maidenhood to demonstrate what lay hidden within her, like ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy

... pyre and Troy is dead That sparkled so the day I saw it first, And darkened slowly after. I am she Who loves all beauty—yet I wither it. Why have the high gods made me wreak their wrath— Forever since my maidenhood to sow Sorrow and blood about me? Lo, they keep Their bitter care above me even now. It was the gods who led me to this lair, That tho' the burning winds should make me weak, They should not snatch the life from out my lips. Olympus let the other women die; They shall ...
— Helen of Troy and Other Poems • Sara Teasdale

... share of the receipts which fell to the minor members was small—but it was full of variety and sometimes of excitement. If the work did not entirely drive away the remembrance of Lancelot Vane it enabled her to look upon the romance of her early maidenhood with equanimity. Her love affair had become a regret tinged with ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce

... Sent by his father Talaues, and the fifth Is Capancus, who brags he will destroy Thebe with desolating fire. The sixth, Parthonopaeus, from the Arcadian glen Comes bravely down, swift Atalanta's child, Named from his mother's lingering maidenhood Ere she conceived him. And the seventh am I, Thy son, or if not thine, but the dire birth Of evil Destiny, yet named thy son, Who lead this dauntless host from Argolis Against the Theban land. Now one and all We pray ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles

... who had two sons, had agreed by letter, while their children were still young, that the older son of the one was to marry the older daughter of the other, and the younger son the younger daughter. When Leah grew to maidenhood, and inquired about her future husband, all her tidings spoke of his villainous character, and she wept over her fate until her eyelashes dropped from their lids. But Rachel grew more and more beautiful day by day, for all who spoke of Jacob praised and extolled ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg

... of ritual. There was no priestly caste; each city and each citizen approached the gods directly at any time and place. The religious life, as a life distinct from that of an ordinary citizen, was unknown in Greece. Even at Rome the perpetual maidenhood of the Vestals was a unique observance; and they were the keepers of the hearth-fire of the city, not the intermediaries between it and its gods. But the Vestals have no parallel in Greek life. Asiatic rites and devotions, it is true, from ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail

... sows the seeds of consumption and other disease. The first thing the child learns is that it is its duty to be pretty—to look its best. It is taught to value dress and show as the great necessities of existence, and is trained in the most extravagant habits. As the girl advances towards maidenhood, she is forced forward, and made to look as much like a woman as possible. Her education is cared for after a fashion, but amounts to very little. She learns to play a little on some musical instrument, to sing a little, to paint a little—in short she acquires but ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe

... and romancists for nothing. Perhaps Broussard would say more to her—at that thought a lovely light came into Anita's innocent eyes. Perhaps he had forgotten everything. Then Anita's eyes were troubled. The pride of maidenhood was born, as it should be, with love, and Anita no longer ran to the window to see Broussard, but when he was present he filled the room; when he spoke she heard no other ...
— Betty at Fort Blizzard • Molly Elliot Seawell

... bloom, by sun and wind unwooed, Seems to expand and blossom 'mid the snows, A lily sceptreless, a scentless rose, For dainty listlessness of maidenhood. ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac

... always lost really true of chastity? she would ask herself. She might prove it false if she could veil bygones. The recuperative power which pervaded organic nature was surely not denied to maidenhood alone. ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy

... good my lord!" she rejoined quietly. "There is no treachery in my desire to serve Caesar in single maidenhood, or to offer thee my ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... parenthood from alcohol," which I advocate as the first and most urgent motto for the real temperance reformer. Yet the question of parenthood may be entirely left out of consideration, and even so the advice here given to the girl about to choose a husband—alas, that only a small proportion of maidenhood can be in that fortunate state, which is yet the right and natural one!—is warranted and more than warranted. We may go so far as to declare that it is a great duty, laid upon the young womanhood of civilization, to protect itself and the future, and to serve its own contemporary ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby

... in a meditation. "Poor Kate! poor Kate! We were bairns together, M. Montaiglon, innocent bairns, and happy, twenty years syne, and I will not say but what in her maidenhood there was some warmth between us, so that I know her well. She was compelled by her relatives to marriage with our parchment friend yonder, and there you have the start of what has been hell on earth for her. The man has not the soul of a louse, ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro

... after examining witnesses from Domremy, and the Queen of Sicily and other great ladies to whom Joan was intrusted, the clergy found nothing in her but "goodness, humility, frank maidenhood, piety, honesty and simplicity." As for her wearing a man's dress, the Archbishop of Embrim said to the king, "It is more becoming to do these things in man's clothes, since they have to be ...
— The Junior Classics • Various

... impossible draperies sprawled among the pictures in the big Bible, and who excited her wonder as much by their garments as their turkey-wings and brandishing arms. So she betook herself to pets, and growing up to the old-maidenhood of thirty-five before her father fell asleep, was by that time the centre of a little world of her own,—hens, chickens, squirrels, cats, dogs, lambs, and sundry transient guests of stranger kind; so that, when she left her old home, and removed to the little house in Dalton that had been left ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various

... Him; but I WILL speak of the morbid corruption and waste of vital power in religious sentiment, by which the pure strength of that which should be the guiding soul of every nation, the splendour of its youthful manhood, and spotless light of its maidenhood, is averted or cast away. You may see continually girls who have never been taught to do a single useful thing thoroughly; who cannot sew, who cannot cook, who cannot cast an account, nor prepare a ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin

... is our childhood, for THEN we are thoughtless; but when we attain maidenhood, lo! we are driven away from our homes, sold as merchandise, and compelled to marry ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis

... season: one white moss-rosebud in her smoothly-braided hair; her dimpled, round, white shoulders left to their own adornment; and for jewels, only one opal on her ripening bosom;—as much of her dress as was shown was the simple white bodice of pure maidenhood. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various

... the tale goes, once tended sheep along the marsh-meadow of Peneus among men of old time; for dear to her were maidenhood and a couch unstained. But, as she guarded her flock by the river, Apollo carried her off far from Haemonia and placed her among the nymphs of the land, who dwelt in Libya near the Myrtosian height. And here to Phoebus she bore Aristaeus whom the Haemonians, ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius

... spiritual welfare is not wholly attributable to an uncle's and guardian's solicitude in behalf of an orphaned niece. A much closer bond, the bond between husband and wife, united them, for when Esther had grown to maidenhood, Mordecai had espoused her. (79) Naturally, Esther would have been ready to defend her conjugal honor with her life. She would gladly have suffered death at the hands of the king's bailiffs rather than yield herself to a man not her husband. Luckily, there was no need for this ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG

... engaged in these and other golden dreams of maidenhood as she walked in the Saski Gardens this March morning. The faces of those who passed her were tranquil enough. The news of yesterday's doings in St. Petersburg had not reached Warsaw, or, at all events, had not been given to the public yet. Even rumor is leaden-footed in this ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman

... fondly, trusted him so wholly, clung to him so faithfully, that mine eyes had to be torn open before I would see the truth—that even now, after all these years, it is like thrusting a dagger into my soul to tell you verily who and what he is. Ay, child, I loved that man in mine early maidenhood, better than ever thou didst or wouldst have done. Dost thou think it was easy to stand up to the face that I had loved, and to play the avenging angel toward his perfidy? If thou dost, thou mayest know much of foolishness ...
— Joyce Morrell's Harvest - The Annals of Selwick Hall • Emily Sarah Holt

... not even habit can modify or obscure. A girl might be mistaken, with her heart and nature undeveloped, and with that closer intimate life with another of another sex still untried. With the transition from maidenhood to wifehood, fateful beyond all transitions, yet unmade, she might be mistaken once; as so many have been in the revelations of first intimacy; but not twice, not the second time. It was not possible to be mistaken in so vital a thing twice. This was merely ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... question of her masculine attire, she said she would wear woman's dress only when she heard Mass, and woman's clothing at her execution, if it came to that. The judges were perfectly well aware of her proved maidenhood, and of the real reason for her dress, but they persisted—without result—in trying to trap her into dangerous replies. She was far too direct and simple to be caught, just because she saw no "heresy" in an act ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook

... waves. Part of the heritage of youth—its gay and adventurous longing for experience—had been filched from her before she was old enough to know its value. In time she would perhaps recover her self-esteem, but she would never know in its fullness that divine right of American maidenhood to rule its environment and ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine

... which he made such progress that he had already become the favourite pupil of his celebrated namesake Lopez, the best painter of modern Spain. Such was Maria Diaz, who, according to a custom formerly universal in Spain, and still very prevalent, retained the name of her maidenhood though married. Such was Maria Diaz and ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow

... how oft she stood, Pure in her guileless maidenhood, By dying bed, in hovel lone, Whose sorrow she had made ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various

... to his private room every silk, satin, and gauze within the range of pale pink, pale crocus, pale green, silver and azure. Then came chromatic scales of colour; combinations meant to vulgarise the rainbow; sinfonies and fugues; the twittering of birds and the great peace of dewy nature; maidenhood in her awakening innocence; "The Dawn in June." ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams

... parted lips he stood, And well content at such a price to see That calm wide brow, that terrible maidenhood, The marvel of that pitiless chastity, Ah! well content indeed, for never wight Since Troy's young shepherd prince had ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde

... sails flapping idly against the mast, others swinging slowly, from their fast anchors. And queen of all this peaceful scene-appeared the metropolis of Australia, with its white houses, lofty spires, and thronged wharves-thus she appeared-sitting in the prime of youth, laying aside her maidenhood to wed the world. ...
— The Duke's Prize - A Story of Art and Heart in Florence • Maturin Murray

... scarcely be called a matronly personage. Having married when about sixteen, she was now just thirty-eight years of age; and though the bloom of maidenhood was gone, the beauty of a well-favoured and healthy woman still remained. She wore a cloak of rich blue wool, and under it a scarlet kirtle ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne

... entertained them all. Then began King Malcolm to yearn after the child's sister, Margaret, to wife; but he and all his men long refused; and she also herself was averse, and said that she would neither have him nor any one else, if the Supreme Power would grant, that she in her maidenhood might please the mighty Lord with a carnal heart, in this short life, in pure continence. The king, however, earnestly urged her brother, until he answered Yea. And indeed he durst not otherwise; for they were come into his kingdom. So that then it was fulfilled, as God had long ere foreshowed; ...
— The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle • Unknown

... that Dic and Rita grew up together on the heart of the hearth; and what wonder that their own hearts were welded by the warmth and light of its cheery god. Thus the boy grew to manhood and the girl to maidenhood, then to young womanhood, at which time, ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major

... to a private sitting-room, which chanced to be the one which had belonged to Mrs. Barker in the days of her maidenhood, and was the sacred, impenetrable bower to which she retired when her daily duties of waiting upon her father's guests were over. But the breath of custom had passed through it since then, and but little remained of its former maiden glories, except a few ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte

... been so suspicious, was the lucky individual upon whom she intended to bestow her hand. Verily, with all these wedding-bells sounding, Betty began to feel that she was likely to be left alone, but who only laughed gayly when twitted with her fancy for maidenhood, and danced as merrily at Sally's wedding as if her heart had lain light in her bosom instead of aching bitterly for one whom she began to fear ...
— An Unwilling Maid • Jeanie Gould Lincoln

... ado to conceal her chagrin; she had started out with bright hopes of securing a brilliant match, and now, though not yet twenty, began to be haunted with the terrible, boding fear of old maidenhood. ...
— Elsie's children • Martha Finley

... and Jean and Andre and Valentin; and they collected round Reine Allix, who said to them, "My children, for love of money all our fairest fruits and flowers—yea, even to the best blossoms of our maidenhood—were sent to be bought and sold in Paris. We sinned therein, and this ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various

... great fear of becoming old maids. We are told how this fear expresses itself in foreign countries. In Spain e. g., it is said that a Spanish woman who has passed her first bloom takes the first available candidate for her hand in order to avoid old-maidenhood; and in Russia every mature girl who is able to do so, goes abroad for a couple of years in order to return as "widow.'' Everybody knows the event, nobody asks for particulars about it. Some such process is universal, and ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden

... maidenhood with, seemingly, the same features, the same voices, the same tastes, and with an unbounded love for and confidence in each other. As they always dressed alike nobody could be sure which was ...
— The Girls of Central High Aiding the Red Cross - Or Amateur Theatricals for a Worthy Cause • Gertrude W. Morrison

... "Fair Maid" they were playing, the mystic dance of Southland maidenhood, at whose vestal rites no male of any age was ever permitted to be present. The words broke in upon the gloom which oppressed Sholto's heart. Momentarily he forgot his master and saw Maud Lindesay with the little Margaret Douglas of whom the children sang, ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett

... bare To the winds his golden hair, By the mainmast stood; Graceful was his form, and slender, And his eyes were deep and tender As a woman's, in the splendor Of her maidenhood. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... pewter, and her wrists and ankles are gay with hoops of painted shell-lac; and even she stains her eyelids with lampblack, and tinges her nails with henna. Much lovelier was our pretty ayah in her maidenhood, when her dainty bosom was decked with shells and sweet-scented flowers, and her raven hair lighted up with sprays of the Indian jasmine, which first ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various

... schemes for fortune. It made her wince to think that she had been discarded for an awkward hoyden of a girl, her equal in no particular. So she stigmatized her rival, as she chose to consider Maggie Windsor. "He loved me in the days of my green maidenhood," she said to herself, "but now that I am become the most beautiful woman in England he disdains me." Even Jawkins had spoken of her as the most beautiful woman in ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.

... nuptials, espousals, nuptial rites. Antonyms: celibacy, divorce, bachelorhood, maidenhood. Associated Words: misogamy, misogamist, affiance, affianced, affinity, intermarriage, conjugality, misalliance, agamist, benedict, betroth, betrothal, desponsory, ante-nuptial, sponsal, hymeneal, schatchen, connubial, connubiality, fiance, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... thing it would have been! Whoever heard of a girl on this side of the Maros being married without her farewell to maidenhood. I am paying for the supper and for everything because I want my bride's farewell to be finer and grander than anything that has ever been seen for many kilometres round. I have stinted nothing—begrudged nothing. I have given an ox, two pigs and a calf to ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... said, a faint sad smile flitting across her pallid lips. "Why I should feel abased and self-degraded, I can well comprehend. I, who have fallen from the high estate, the purity, the wealth, the consciousness of chaste and virtuous maidenhood! I, the despised, the castaway, the fallen! But thou, thou!—from thee I looked but for reproaches—the just reproaches I have earned by my faithless folly! I thought, indeed, to have found you wretched, writhing in the dark bonds which ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert

... home without a life pilot. And this pilot should be her own conscience, hedged about with the learning, the good breeding, the fine character that she herself, under proper guidance, must cultivate through the impressionable years of childhood and maidenhood. If she so wills it, beauty and grace and true worth are all hers. And let her greet and go forth in the freshness of each golden day, as indeed, she must greet life, itself, with ...
— The Girl Wanted • Nixon Waterman

... you cast a glance, a smile; You are not as one of these, Yours is beauty without guile. Round your maiden brows and hair Maidenhood and Childhood met Crown and kiss you, sweet and fair, New art's ...
— Grass of Parnassus • Andrew Lang

... and there, on white sheets spread over a mattress of fine sheep's wool, and protected from the cold by bright blue coverlets's, lay a graceful, lovely girl asleep; this was Rhodopis' granddaughter, Sappho. The rounded form and delicate figure seemed to denote one already in opening maidenhood, but the peaceful, blissful smile could only belong ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... hapless violets as though they were indeed not blooms insensitive but actually 'poor girls neglected.' His pages breathe their clean and innocent perfumes, and are beautiful with the chaste beauty of their colour, just as they carry with them something of the sweetness and simplicity of maidenhood itself. And from both he extracts the same pathetic little moral: both are lovely and both must die. And so, between his virgins that are for love indeed and those that sit silent and delicious in the 'flowery nunnery,' the old singer finds life so good a thing that ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley

... singing in his brain, like a choir of awakened birds. Quickly he seized paper and wrote down the theme that flowed out at the point of his pen—a reverie full of the haunting magic of quiet waters and woodland sunsets and the gracious innocence of maidenhood. When it was done he felt he must give it a distinctive name. He cast about for one, pondering and rejecting titles innumerable. Countless lines of poetry ran through his head, from which he sought to pick a word or two as one plucks a violet from a posy. At ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill

... life; how, oft she stood, Sweet in her guileless maidenhood, By dying bed, in hovel lone, Whose sorrow ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman

... masked all emotion. It kept under lock and key the insurgent impulses that moved him when he looked into the sloe eyes charged with reserve. Back of them, he felt, was the mystery of purity, of maidenhood. He longed to know her better, to find out and to appropriate for himself the woman that lay behind the fine veil of flesh. She seemed to him delicate as a flame and as vivid. There would come a day when her innocent, passional nature would respond to the love of a man ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine

... as long, but it was not that which impressed him with the sense of change. It was a certain girlish winsomeness, something elusive, which cannot be defined, but which lends a charm like nothing else in all the world to the sweet unfolding of early maidenhood. ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston

... Charley Dennis who had made his pile in the wheat-pit) was a busy person. Scenting social prestige, of which she was avid, in connection with Cecily Wayne, she had sought to establish herself as the natural protectress of unchaperoned maidenhood and had met with a ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... Also maidenhood of body without wem is common to them all, and so is birth also. For they are not medlied with service of Venus, nother resolved with lechery, nother bruised with sorrow of birth of children. And yet they bring forth ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele

... impede the recognition of the wonderful art which could afford a little to humanity on so trying an occasion. For she was as it were beginning her career anew; literally to her was this a new world; and she felt for a moment as if in her first blushing maidenhood of song. This second time the hesitation of the voice in that commencement was not felt. The note began soft and timid and scarce audible, as the prayer of Norma might have done; but how it gradually swelled with the influx of divine strength into the soul! The grand difficulty in the opening andante ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton

... after him along the garden-path, with the endless messages and warnings girls are so prone to give; and the young man, with a great softness at his heart, went away, as many another John has gone, feeling better for the companionship of innocent maidenhood, and stronger to wrestle with temptation, to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... maidenhood is not for long, Whom the Phoeacian chiefs already woo, Lords of the land whence thou thyself art sprung. Soon as the shining dawn comes forth anew, For wain and mules thy noble father sue, Which to the ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... unruffled, but with evidence of unbending character behind it, in some way conjured something out of the past, and he saw her again, the greying locks restored to their youthful glory and the careworn cheek abloom with the colour of young maidenhood as they had been in the gathering shadows that night when they swore to build their own home, and live their own lives, and love each other, always, only, for ever and ever...And yet, to let her defiance go unchecked, to have his authority challenged before his own children—it would be the beginning ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead

... the Kentish river swirling past their doors at Broomhill might aptly be compared with those of the farms round the Woolpack, who woke to find that Joanna Godden was not going just to jog on her final choice between Arthur Alce and old maidenhood, but had swept aside to make ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith

... her hands gaily; although growing to maidenhood, she had the heart of a child, and was full of delight at the thought of anything that promised ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green

... her seem older than the twenty-two years with which the inscription on the portrait credits her. But the face is that of one who has just passed from maidenhood to young womanhood. Life lies before her, and with sweet seriousness she builds her air castles of the future. Thus far she has been carefully guarded from the evil of the world, and her heart is as pure as that of "the lily maid of Astolat." For social triumphs she would care nothing, ...
— Van Dyck - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll

... maidenhood, from among whom he was expected to make his choice, were at length seated in various constrained attitudes about the room, a dead silence fell, broken only by an occasional nervous remark from Mrs. ...
— North, South and Over the Sea • M.E. Francis (Mrs. Francis Blundell)

... Old maidenhood set in much earlier in those days than at present; the sisters acquiesced, and Betty had run about as usual all the morning in her mob-cap, and chintz gown tucked through her pocket-holes, and only at the last submitted ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge

... photograph—one of my father—in a silver frame on the dressing-table. This, too, was a fine countenance, possessed of well-cut features and refined expression. This was the prince who had won Lucy Bossier from her home. I looked around my pretty bedroom—it had been my mother's in the days of her maidenhood. In an exclusive city boarding-school, and amid the pleasant surroundings of this home, her youth ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin

... various ranks to one another. Great Britain is essentially the home of the chaperon. We pride ourselves, as a nation, upon the extreme care with which we protect our young gentlewomen from contaminating influences. But the fastidious attention which we bestow upon our national maidenhood is as nothing in comparison with the protective commotion with which we surround that shrinking ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay

... end of the broad living-room at Greenvale with great sprays of apple blossoms from the orchard, ravishing untold spoilage of her mother and forerunner, Eve, for the bedecking of the quiet, cozy nook. Pink was ever her color; the hue of the flushing of spring, of the rising blood in the cheek of maidenhood, and the tenderest of the fruit-blooms was not more downy-soft of tint than the face it bent to brush. At the close of the task, a ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... the eyes of the Church may be illustrated in various ways. For example, the homilies of the Anglo-Saxon AElfric testify to a triple division of the people of God. "There are," says he, "three states which bear witness of Christ; that is, maidenhood, and widowhood, and lawful matrimony." And with the quaintness of mediaeval symbolists, he affirms that the house of Cana in Galilee had three floors—the lowest occupied by believing married laymen, the next by reputable widows, and the uppermost by ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell

... eternal infamy, poor Mary Tudor might well have expected a juster as well as a more charitable verdict from posterity. From her girlhood to her grave her story was tragic in its sadness. When she was in the first bloom of maidenhood, she was taken by her father to hold her Court of the Welsh Marches at Ludlow in 1525. The title of Princess of Wales was not conferred upon her, but she was surrounded by all the pomps and emblems of sovereignty. The Court was the Princess's Court, as it had been Prince Henry's Court in ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude

... that moment Aggie had looked at Susie, and Susie at Aggie, each trying to master the meaning of the other's face. It was Susie who understood first. Prosperity was very becoming to Susie. She was the pretty one now, and she knew it. Marriage had done for her what maidenhood had done for her sister, and Susie was the image of ...
— The Judgment of Eve • May Sinclair

... reflection from the thistle heads that nodded at her through the snake fence. It had taken sixteen years of pure-hearted, joyous living to lend those eyes, azure as the sky above, their brave, clear glance; sixteen years of unsullied maidenhood to endow her with that divine something of mystery which, with its shy reserve and fearless trust, awakens reverence and rebukes impurity as with the vision ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor

... roam The scented hills at morn, to gather flowers; To gaze into the fountain's glassy mirror, Or list the sweet birds sigh on every bough, Thou art a woodnymph, speaks thy fair attire. Sweet fancy of a sweeter maidenhood, That thou dost walk at dawn a woodnymph wild. Here will I seal upon thy foam-white brow My flame again, which burns like yonder orb. Odora! speak to me! thy voice is sweet, As sounds of rescue to ...
— Lays of Ancient Virginia, and Other Poems • James Avis Bartley

... has been abrogated. Wherefore Jerome [*The quotation is from Can. Tria. xxxvi, qu. 2] declares the contrary: "Three kinds of lawful marriage," says he, "are mentioned in Holy Writ. The first is that of a chaste maiden given away lawfully in her maidenhood to a man. The second is when a man finds a maiden in the city, and by force has carnal knowledge of her. If the father be willing, the man shall endow her according to the father's estimate, and shall pay the price of her purity [*Cf. Deut. 22:23-29]. The third is, when the maiden is ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas

... runnen in the mountains all the night, And sleep under a bush; and she could eke Wrestle by very force and very might With any young man, were he ne'er so wight;* *active, nimble There mighte nothing in her armes stond. She kept her maidenhood from every wight, To no man deigned she ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer

... the Earl of Leicester, loosed an arrow at Queen Elizabeth; but the Virgin Queen's maidenhood was so unassailable that the bolt missed her, hitting the Countess of Essex, ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick

... in her noblest mood Has yielded: she, my golden-crowned rose! The bride of every sense! more sweet than those Who breathe the violet breath of maidenhood. O visage of still music in the sky! Soft moon! I feel thy song, my fairest friend! True harmony within can apprehend Dumb harmony without. And hark! 'tis nigh! Belief has struck the note of sound: a gleam Of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... with her; for the Japanese girl is shaved—cheeks, ears, brows, chin, even nose! What is here to shave? Only that peachy floss which is the velvet of the finest human skin, but which Japanese taste removes. There is, however, another use for the razor. All maidens bear the signs of their maidenhood in the form of a little round spot, about an inch in diameter, shaven clean upon the very top of the head. This is only partially concealed by a band of hair brought back from the forehead across it, and fastened to the back hair. The girl-baby's ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn

... answered back glance for glance, and being equipped for conquest let go the full battery of their woman's witchery. It made a charming spectacle of young and noble blood indulging in the abandon of the hour. There were dames that set the pace for modest maidenhood, that ogled with the younger beaux,—(as they do to this day). Lady Bettie Payne swept her fingers over the keys of an Italian spinet, that was ornamented with precious stones, and sat upon a table of coral-veined wood; she sung soft and tenderly of ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne

... strips of crimson and yellow cloth and then twisted like a garland around her head. She was not more than twelve or thirteen years old, but tall, straight as a young pine, and beautifully formed, with the promise of early maidenhood in the gentle swell of her bosom. Her complexion was lovely—pink, brightened with sunburnt gold,—and her eyes like the blossoms of the forget-me-not, in hue. In watching her firm yet graceful tread, as she easily kept pace with the horse, I could not realise that in a few more years ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor

... affection for his womenfolk which it would not be seemly for the world to know about. Standing with a friend of mine on a high flat housetop in Calcutta one day, I saw a Hindu father on the next-door housetop proudly and lovingly walking and talking with his daughter who was just budding into maidenhood. "His affection is quite unmistakable," my friend said to me, "and yet if in public, he would never ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe

... innocent recollections which on the magic wings of Nature and Night came wafted over her mind, she bent down her head upon her lute, pressed her round, dimpled cheek against its smooth frame, and drawing her fingers mechanically over its strings, abandoned herself unreservedly to the reveries of maidenhood and youth. ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins

... approach in the night-time, and in the morning when the reconnoitring took place, that he appeared sad and much depressed. The truth was that, by a strange freak of destiny, it had come to pass that the stronghold he was set to reduce was the home of his own sister, whom he had tenderly loved during her maidenhood, and whom he loved now, in spite of the estrangement which had resulted from hostilities with her husband's family. He believed, too, that, notwithstanding this cruel division, she still was sincerely attached ...
— A Group of Noble Dames • Thomas Hardy

... ago he promised me. I took his name then, as we do in the Cold Country. They still call me Tara! Years I have waited, true to my promise—with even my name of maidenhood relinquished. His name—Tara! And now he tosses me aside—because you, only an Earth ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings

... shall be disendowed—that will be the end of it! Dame Hannah—you're a nice old person—you could marry if you liked. There's old Adam—Robin's faithful servant—he loves you with all the frenzy of a boy of fourteen. HAN. Nay—that may never be, for I am pledged! ALL. To whom? HAN. To an eternal maidenhood! Many years ago I was betrothed to a god-like youth who woo'd me under an assumed name. But on the very day upon which our wedding was to have been celebrated, I discovered that he was no other than Sir Roderic Murgatroyd, ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan

... but in a sadly jostled state as to one's nerves and much disordered as to one's wardrobe. Hearing my voice uplifted in entreaty as I was carried by them, they had nobly responded; and, because of the impulse of the throng, which accorded to frail maidenhood what was denied to stalwart masculinity, they had succeeded in reaching ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb

... perhaps, because she was so happy in the love of her brothers and sisters, as well as because she was wedded to literature, that she was content, in spite of her good looks, to assume the symbolic cap of perpetual maidenhood ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith

... the cabin windows or met in the persons of her father's lodgers. Shut up for days in this quaint tenement, she had seen it change from the enchanted playground of her childish fancy to the theater of her active maidenhood, but without losing her ideal romance in it. She had translated its history in her own way, read its quaint nautical hieroglyphics after her own fashion, and possessed herself of its secrets. She had in fancy made voyages in it to foreign lands, ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte

... cherishing the down on his chin. But the most rapid development had been in Aldonza, or Alice, as Perronel insisted on calling her to suit the ears of her neighbours. The girl was just reaching the borderland of maidenhood, which came all the sooner to one of southern birth and extraction, when the great change took her from being her father's childish darling to be Perronel's companion and assistant. She had lain down on that fatal May Eve a child, she rose in ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... war-array Of Trojan and Laurentine men, and King Latinus' wall, Then upon Turnus' sister's ear her words of God did fall: A goddess she, the queen of mere and sounding river-wave; Which worship Jupiter the King, the Heaven-Abider gave 140 A hallowed gift to pay her back for ravished maidenhood: ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil

... anything but a vision, she believed now, and believing, regretted. The cold facts of her existence couldn't be daydreamed away. She was married, and marriage put a full stop to the potential adventuring of youth. Twenty and maidenhood lies at the opposite pole from twenty-four and matrimony. Stella subscribed to that. She took for her guiding-star—theoretically—the twin concepts of morality and duty as she had been taught to construe them. So she saw no loophole, ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... had known it. She had lived all these years with a heart as virgin as mountain snows. When the one sweet dream which comes to most in early maidenhood—the dream of loving and being loved—was crushed, her heart drew back within itself, and, after a time of suffering almost as deep as if for the loss of a real object instead of a mere ideal, she prepared herself for her destiny. She went out into society, and there saw men, ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)

... and the fatigue, yet exuberant energy, of rapid journeys. Her circumstances were now very different. She had been shut up in prison for months, for six weeks at least she had been in irons, and the air of heaven had not blown upon this daughter of the fields; her robust yet sensitive maidenhood had been exposed to a hundred offences, and to the constant society, infecting the very air about, of the rudest of men; yet so far is her spirit from being broken that she meets all those potent, grave, and reverend ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant

... little, it was perhaps because she thought the more; for Helen was now of the susceptible age of "sweet seventeen," an age that not only feels warmly but thinks deeply; and, who shall say what feelings and thoughts may lie beneath the pure waters of that sea of maidenhood whose surface is so still and calm? Love alone can tell: - Love, the bold diver, who can cleave that still surface, and bring up into the light of heaven the rich treasures that are of ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede

... busy days Ume-ko moved as one but little interested. Kano and Uchida noticed nothing unusual. To them she was merely the conventional nonenity of maidenhood that Japanese etiquette demanded. It never entered their heads that she would not have agreed with equal readiness to any other ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa

... filling the infinite of her dark and fathomless eyes with a radiance as of heaven. And in this gay return of youth and happiness, an exquisite instinct had prompted her to put on a white gown, a plain girlish gown which symbolised her maidenhood, which told that she had remained through all a pure untarnished lily for the husband of her choice. And nothing of her form was to be seen, not a glimpse of bosom or shoulder. It was as if the impenetrable, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... maidens' fire to-morrow! All ye who have never yielded to the pleading of man, who have not destroyed your innocency, you alone are invited, to proclaim anew before the Sun and the Earth, before your companions and in the sight of the Great Mystery, the chastity and purity of your maidenhood. Come ye, all who have not ...
— The Soul of the Indian - An Interpretation • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman

... silver face Flowed from the spiritual lily that she held. Lo! these her emblems drew mine eyes—away: For see, how perfect-pure! As light a flush As hardly tints the blossom of the quince Would mar their charm of stainless maidenhood.' ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson

... the sins,—but this and that fair deed Which a soul's sin at length could supersede. These yet are virgins, whom death's timely knell Might once have sainted; whom the fiends compel Together now, in snake-bound shuddering sheaves Of anguish, while the scorching bridegroom leaves Their refuse maidenhood abominable. ...
— The House of Life • Dante Gabriel Rossetti

... and the utter marring of my person, whence it suddenly came upon me, a wretched creature! For nightly visions thronging to my maiden chamber, would entice me with smooth words: "O damsel, greatly fortunate, why dost thou live long time in maidenhood, when it is in thy power to achieve a match the very noblest? for Jupiter is fired by thy charms with the shaft of passion, and longs with thee to share in love. But do not, my child, spurn away from thee the couch of ...
— Prometheus Bound and Seven Against Thebes • Aeschylus

... me forget her form! Soft and seductive, that contained each charm, Each grace the sweet word maidenhood implies; And all the sensuous youth of line and curve, That makes men's eyes Bondsmen of beauty eager still to serve.— In every part that memory can warm, ...
— Weeds by the Wall - Verses • Madison J. Cawein

... with a bonnet that recalled the bridal wreath only just laid aside, was also certain to be of a general universal type with the broad hips, wide waist, muscular limbs, and the melting sweetness of lips and eyes that only abundant health and a rich animalism of nature bring to maidenhood. ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd

... of any "happy results" which they advertise to share with a limited number of gentlemen, we shall deem them unworthy of their sex, unless they explain the process by which these results are attained, for the benefit of those who are fast verging toward the autumnal stage of maidenhood. ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 9, May 28, 1870 • Various

... the calm, unconscious lethargy of her maidenhood's untroubled dreams the soul of Vera had awakened at length to the realization of the strong, passionate woman's heart that ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron

... happy girl, Whom fourteen years have seen, Blooming in gentle maidenhood, As fair as ...
— Home Lyrics • Hannah. S. Battersby

... being rebellious, the manifest fundamental idea of the plot is to marry Elizabeth to Arran and deny "entrance and title" to the rightful Queen. It was an admirable scheme, and had Arran not become a lunatic, had Elizabeth not been "that imperial votaress" vowed to eternal maidenhood, their bridal, with the consequent loss of the Scottish throne by Mary, would have been the most fortunate of all possible events. The brethren had, in short, a perfect right to defend their creed in arms; a perfect ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang

... and briars on the path far ahead are trampled by other feet, and plucked by other hands, and when the miles have been cleared and trodden, the unknown laborer comes forth from his obscurity, and humbly asks her to arise from her quiet nook, to shake off the inactivity of her maidenhood, and to tread the beaten ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera

... lips, In dribbling monologue 'twixt whiffs and sips, 420 The story I so long have tried to tell; The humor coarse, the persons common,—well, From Nature only do I love to paint, Whether she send a satyr or a saint; To me Sincerity's the one thing good, Soiled though she be and lost to maidenhood. Quompegan is a town some ten miles south From Jethro, at Nagumscot river-mouth, A seaport town, and makes its title good With lumber and dried fish and eastern wood. 430 Here Deacon Bitters dwelt and kept the Store, The ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... brother. Dark the tale of crime, And long, but briefly be the sum supplied. Sychaeus was her lord, in happier time The richest of Phoenicians far and wide In land, and worshipped by his hapless bride. Her, in the bloom of maidenhood, her sire Had given him, and with virgin rites allied. But soon her brother filled the throne of Tyre, Pygmalion, swoln with sin; 'twixt whom a feud ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil

... maiden glow'd, But that was in her earlier maidenhood, With such a fervent flame of human love, Which being rudely blunted glanced and shot Only to holy things; to prayer and praise She gave ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand

... a most exquisite, perfect flower of maidenhood. When I first saw her, she stood just so, with her open palms full of yellow jasmine. I laid my heart into them, too, my whole heart, my whole life, and every joy ...
— Winter Evening Tales • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr



Words linked to "Maidenhood" :   childhood, maidhood, girlhood, maiden



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