"Middle age" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in love with young Gourlay's mother when she herself was a gay young fliskie at Tenshillingland, but his little romance was soon ended when Gourlay came and whisked her away. But she remained the one romance of his life. Now in his gross and jovial middle age he idealized her in memory (a sentimentalist, of course—he was Scotch); he never saw her in her scraggy misery to be disillusioned; to him she was still the wee bit lairdie's dochter, a vision that had dawned on his wretched ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... bear in mind always that the period I have gone over in this essay begins when the Reformer was already beyond the middle age, and already broken in bodily health: it has been the story of an old man's friendships. This it is that makes Knox enviable. Unknown until past forty, he had then before him five-and-twenty years of splendid and influential life, passed through uncommon hardships to an uncommon degree of power, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... whose name, variously written—Hiawatha, Hayenwatha, Ayonhwahtha, Taoungwatha—is rendered, "he who seeks the wampum belt." He had made himself greatly esteemed by his wisdom and his benevolence. He was now past middle age. Though many of his friends and relatives had perished by the machinations of Atotarho, he himself had been spared. The qualities which gained him general respect had, perhaps, not been without influence even on that redoubtable chief. Hiawatha had long beheld with grief the ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... the Review marks the close of a task which was confided to me no less than fifteen years ago—grande mortalis cevi spatium, a long span of one's mortal days. Fifteen years are enough to bring a man from youth to middle age, to test the working value of convictions, to measure the advance of principles and beliefs, and, alas! to cut off many early associates and to extinguish many lights. It is hardly possible that a Review should have been conducted for so considerable a ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... friends, to prefer books she had read before, to sew a little where she could watch her two children to whom she was devoted. She worried about little things—if she saw crumbs on the dinner-table her mind drifted off the conversation: she was receding gradually into middle age. ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... on the scene when the second set stood at six-all, bringing with him an alert, thin-faced man of middle age, clad in the uniform of a colonel in the United States Engineers. Mr. Temple with his wife emerged from the house to greet their guests, and all four were interested spectators of the two concluding games which were ...
— The Radio Boys with the Revenue Guards • Gerald Breckenridge
... facts as I have read them," pursued Lecoq. "When the murderer repaired to the Poivriere with the two women, his companion—I should say his accomplice—came here to wait. He was a tall man of middle age; he wore a soft hat and a shaggy brown overcoat; he was, moreover, probably married, or had been so, as he had a wedding-ring on the little finger of ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... I saw a man that I was to see again. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man, well on in middle age, with all the evidence of good health and immense strength—strength not alone of body but of will. Unlike most men I was accustomed to about me, he was smooth-shaven. Several days' growth of beard showed that he was already well-grayed. His mouth ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... ensuing. Hypocrisy would do awhile ago, but now debauchery. Profaneness would do when profaneness was in fashion, but now a deceitful profession. Take heed, professor, that thou dost not throw away thy old darling sin for a new one. Men's tempers alter. Youth is for pride and wantonness; middle age for cunning and craft; old age for the world and covetousness. Take heed, therefore, of deceit in ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... he said that he was about to relate the most memorable of all wars that ever were waged; and though we may not express ourselves in such general terms, it is safe to say that no struggle recorded in the annals of antiquity, or of the middle age, surpasses it in importance or in historical interest. The war was to decide whether the conqueror of the world was to be self-centred Rome; or whether it should be a nation of traders, commanded by a powerful general who dictated to them their ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... hard-working man, somewhat past middle age, with a heart not naturally devoid of kindness, but, where his hirelings were concerned, so strongly encrusted with a layer of habits, that they acted as an effectual check upon his better feelings. His family consisted of a wife, said to be a notable manager, and five ...
— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous
... is no necessity; it is only a bad habit. It is very interesting to observe a face that is getting old. What time makes out of a face shows better than anything else what the man has made out of time. Most men in the early period of middle age are neither intellectually fat nor lean, they are hardened or dried up. Naturally young people look upon them with unsympathetic eyes, for they feel that there is such a thing as eternal youth, which a soul can win as a prize ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... woman, who had at least reached middle age. The woman wore a neatly fitting calico gown; the man, a short pilot-coat. His pantaloons were very tight and pale. A new soft hat was pushed forward from the left rear corner of his closely cropped head, with the front of the brim turned down ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... gathering his truth as he goes. Yet by the simple instincts of a soul undebased by self-indulgence or low pursuits, he was drawn ever toward things lofty and good; and life went calmly on, bearing Godfrey Wardour toward middle age, unruffled either ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... A one-armed man of middle age from India, who offered to do his "bit," refused a post at home in keeping with his physical limitations. His eyes were all right, he said, when he nominated himself as a balloon observer, and he never suffered from sea-sickness which sausage balloons most wickedly induce. Many a man who has ascended ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... some violence to herself, which, as we know, she once attempted. Or else they dread some evil adviser. The charwoman states that two or three visits have been lately made at the house by a lady of middle age, richly dressed, in a carriage, whose manner was singular, and who seemed to desire ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... was warmly welcomed by a short, red-faced man, bald of head and rotund in figure, of about fifty-five years of age. His appearance suggested a successful grocer rather than a pirate. On the deck were seated two ladies, one nearing middle age, the other young and undoubtedly pretty. At the feet of these ladies sprawled several small children. Captain Pease proceeded to introduce his guest to these as Mrs. Pease No. 1 and Mrs. Pease No. 2. The ladies continued their sewing while a conversation took place on various subjects. Presently, ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... Instead of listening to the voice of conscience, instead of availing ourselves of the aid of heavenly grace, we have gone on year after year with the vain dream of turning to God some future day. Childhood and boyhood are past; youth, perhaps middle age, perhaps old age is come; and now we find that we cannot "love the thing which God commandeth, and desire that which He doth promise;" and then, instead of laying the blame where it is due, on ourselves, for having hardened ourselves against the influences of grace, we complain ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VIII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... fifteen years constitute the old age of a book. Such a survival might almost be said to be due to a tiny sluice of green sap under the gray bark. where it lies in the matter of this book, or what its source if, indeed, it be really there—is more of a mystery to my middle age than it was ...
— Uncle Remus • Joel Chandler Harris
... Bolle for breaking the peace in the King's palace. Indeed, arrested he must have been, notwithstanding all Jacob Smith could do to save him, had not at that moment a man appeared at whose coming the crowd that had gathered, separated, bowing; a man of middle age with a quick, clever face, who wore rich clothes and a fur-trimmed velvet cap ...
— The Lady Of Blossholme • H. Rider Haggard
... he "fetched a sneeze and wiped his big nose with a red handkerchief" as he stood surveying them in silence, while Dr. John Allen, who had sat on the doorstep reading a paper—a kindly-faced man of middle age with a short white beard under his ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... middle age Had slightly pressed his signet sage, Yet had not quenched the open truth, And fiery vehemence of youth; Forward and frolic glee was there, The will to do, the soul to dare, The sparkling glance, soon blown to fire Of hasty love or headlong ire. The Lady of the Lake, ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... that "Robinson's" was figuratively in the deepest mourning, only rousing itself from its despair to proclaim his merits and those of his father before him, as masters. Men gravely pointed out the old servants he had pensioned; those in middle age whom he had kept on when their best days were past; the boys he had already taken in, fitted out, and launched on the world by judicious, unostentatious backing. Women tearfully reminded the listener how carefully he had provided for their comfort and well-being ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... Until he reached middle age, his quickness of thought and decision was fretted by men of slower mind if they happened to be associated with him on some enterprise, and to certain colleagues his ardour was sometimes almost terrifying. ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... much concern himself about his father's burdens. He assumed, I suppose, that such taxes on a man's brain and general vitality were proper enough to middle age and to the business life of a large city. However, he was living—just as he had principally lived abroad—on his father's bounty. His contributions to the press—whether a daily, or, of late, a monthly—brought in no significant ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... Prometheus, groaning as the vultures tear him'; and with a few such strokes he gives etchings of other celebrities in letters and politics. One may observe with astonishment that the youthful Thackeray, who delighted in suburban chronicles, in mean lives and paltry incidents, has risen by middle age to the rank of an illustrious painter on the broad canvas of history. The annals of literature contain few, if any, other examples of so remarkable ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... rule; they found little occasion for much talk with their neighbors, but used as few words as possible. Nobody was more respected than the brothers. It was often said of them that their word was their bond, and as they passed from youth to middle age, and in these days were growing to look like elderly men, they were free from shame or reproach, though not from much good-natured joking and friendly fun. Their farm had been owned in the family since the settlement of the country, and the house which Martin occupied was very old. Jake's ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... loiter about among the sugar-barrels of the grocery department, there presently appears—with a new tinkle of the little bell—a stout, ruddy man, just past middle age, in broad-brimmed white beaver and sober homespun suit, who is met with a deferential "Good day, Squire," from one and another, as he falls successively into short parley with them. A self-possessed, cheery man, who has strong opinions, and does not fear to express them; Selectman for the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... those who counted upon it were embittered by his appearance upon the down-town streets driving a dog-cart at criminal speed, making pedestrians retreat from the crossings, and behaving generally as if he "owned the earth." A disgusted hardware dealer of middle age, one of those who hungered for Georgie's downfall, was thus driven back upon the sidewalk to avoid being run over, and so far forgot himself as to make use of the pet street insult of the year: "Got 'ny sense! See here, bub, does your mother ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... beleaguered towns. The struggle was such a long one that I have found it impossible to recount all the leading events in the space of a single volume; and, moreover, before the close, my hero, who began as a lad, would have grown into middle age, and it is an established canon in books for boys that the hero must himself be young. I have therefore terminated the story at the murder of William of Orange, and hope in another volume to continue the history, and to recount the progress of the war, when England, after years of hesitation, ...
— By Pike and Dyke: A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic • G.A. Henty
... water deeper than the creek, and that wuzn't over his pumps. "But I cannot see the child die before my eyes, Josiah, and feel that I might have saved him, and yet am I to part with the pardner of my youth and middle age? Am I to ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... and to find her satisfaction elsewhere with one that seemed to her more meet to afford it than her artificer of woollens. In this frame of mind she became enamoured of a man well worthy of her love and not yet past middle age, insomuch that, if she saw him not in the day, she must needs pass an unquiet night. The gallant, meanwhile, remained fancy-free, for he knew nought of the lady's case; and she, being apprehensive of possible perils to ensue, was far too circumspect to make it known to him either by writing ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... prepared at present is sufficiently shown by the result of the recent agitation. Could it terminate otherwise? Was it possible that England, in the nineteenth century, could be brought to adopt the superstitions of the Middle Age? If she could, she would have deserved to be left to the consequences of her besotted folly. We may say, as Milton said, in his day, to the attempted restoration of superstitions which the Reformers had already cast off; "O, if we freeze at noon, after their easy thaw, let us fear lest the sun ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... Germain heard behind him the footsteps of a horse following in his track, and a man of middle age, swarthy, robust, dressed like a semi-bourgeois, shouted to him to stop. Germain had never seen the farmer of Ormeaux; but an angry instinct led him to determine at once that it was he. He turned, and, ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... wood, to the long northern beach, where I proposed to measure a base line, our attention was suddenly called by the screams of three women, who took up their children and ran off in great consternation. Soon afterward a man made his appearance. He was of a middle age, unarmed, except with a whaddie, or wooden scimitar, and came up to us seemingly with careless confidence. We made much of him, and gave him some biscuit; and he in return presented us with a piece of gristly fat, probably of whale. This I tasted; but watching an opportunity ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders
... of Normanstand had remained a bachelor until close on middle age, when the fact took hold of him that there was no immediate heir to his great estate. Whereupon, with his wonted decision, he set ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... In truth he was so near to the famous Puritan village, that, through the hills and intervening tree-tops, he could have seen the spires of the churches had he raised his melancholy eyes from the ground. The rider was not a youth, nor had he reached middle age. His face was handsome, though distorted with agony. Occasionally he pressed his hand to his side as if in pain; but maugre pain, weariness, or anguish, he pressed on, admonished by the lengthening shadows of the approach of night. Turning his great, sad, brown eyes at last to where the ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick
... of himself and a small boy. In place of the usual Anglican hymns two carols are sung by the choir, which have the quaintest effect in such a place, and which appear to interest and even excite one of the congregation. This is a man of middle age, most richly dressed with a certain foreign air about him and evidently in a very delicate state of health. He is accompanied by a lady whose dress is also a marvel of beauty and costliness though hardly of fitness. The broad bands of gold which ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... incline to think that some one event, which we ordinarily refer to the chapter of accidents, has first set the mind to work upon schemes, which would otherwise, perhaps, never be thought of at all. Thus, we find persons who continue very good people, as the world goes, until middle age, or even seniority; then, suddenly breaking out into some enormous offence against decency and society, which startles the whole pious neighborhood. Folks start up, with outstretched hands and staring ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... still in the heat, watching. The elder was a short, hard-faced energetic man of middle age, the younger a labourer of twenty-three or so. They stood in silence watching the advance of the sisters. They watched whilst the girls drew near, and whilst they passed, and whilst they receded down the dusty road, that had dwellings ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... some. The unconquerable personality of Charles Reade showed itself here as elsewhere[48]: and others might be mentioned.[49] But perhaps the most distinguished novelist next to Thackeray of the nineteenth century, who was also a most distinguished letter-writer, was one who died in middle age not long ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... middle age of darkness in Greece: there the light of science and literature remained unextinguished: the knowledge of the works of antiquity was cultivated in the East with enthusiasm; and while we may be confident that we possess ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... as the period of puberty approaches. Yet, even in the last years of childhood there is a greater liability to disease and a larger proportionate loss of life than during youth or middle age. ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... afternoon when Beaut McGregor listened, the oculist was engaged in a violent quarrel with another man, drunk like himself. The second man was a slender dandified fellow of middle age who sold shoes for a Philadelphia jobbing-house. He sat in a chair tilted against the hotel and tried to read aloud from a book. When he was fairly launched in a long paragraph the oculist interrupted. Staggering up and down the narrow board walk before ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson
... was a man of middle age, a stout man with a florid countenance and dewy blue eyes; his skin was of that quality that is easily roughened by the wind. He always spoke rapidly, and ...
— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung
... boy, I was fondest of AEschylus; in youth and middle age I preferred Euripides; now in my declining years I admire Sophocles. I can now at length see that Sophocles is the most perfect. Yet he never rises to the sublime simplicity of AEschylus—simplicity of design, I mean—nor diffuses himself in ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... one else asked your advice? If some one else said, 'Here is my teacher, a jaded married man on the verge of middle age, and he and I have a violent passion for one another. We propose to disregard all our ties, all our obligations, all the established prohibitions of society, and begin life together afresh.' What ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... Cantacuzene had been down to Brentham, and stayed, which he never did anywhere, a couple of days. And the duke was particularly charmed with Mr. Cantacuzene. This gentleman, who was only in the earlier term of middle age, and looked younger than his age, was distinguished in appearance, highly polished, and singularly acute. He appeared to be the master of great wealth, for he offered to make upon Euphrosyne any settlement which the ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... person from whom the words of the poem are supposed to proceed: a superstitious man moderately imaginative, of slow faculties and deep feelings, 'a captain of a small trading vessel, for example, who, being past the middle age of life, had retired upon an annuity, or small independent income, to some village or country town of which he was not a native, or in which he had not been accustomed to live. Such men having nothing to do become credulous and talkative from indolence'. ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... colored mammy took advantage of a wedding announcement to question her mistress, who remained a spinster still though approaching middle age. ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... middle age, with short, sturdy frame, a broad face of pale, copper color, swarthy black brows and a small, stringy mustache. His feet were enclosed in shoepacks, soggy with water, and he was otherwise clad in the nondescript fashion of old bushmen. Around his ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... keen, dark-eyed somber gaze of a Venus man of middle age. A small, slim, graceful man, with sleek black hair. His pointed face, accentuated by the pointed beard, was pallid. He wore a white and purple robe; upon his breast was a huge platinum ornament, a device like a star and ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... does not sometimes, on a quiet evening, even before he has attained to middle age, sit down and look back upon his college days, and his college friends; and think sadly of the failures, the disappointments, the broken hearts, which have been among those who all started fair and promised well? How very much has after life changed the estimates which we, ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... of Prolonging Life after Middle Age. Fourth Edition, Revised and Enlarged. Small crown ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... and here was great-grandfather himself, in middle age, his picture—a faded daguerreotype—showing him in his Sunday best, but plainly in no Sunday mood. "Looks like a pirate," was Annie's comment. There was no picture of great-grandmother. "Probably he killed ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... see a man standing at his side, clothed in robes that had been rich, but were now torn and stained with travel, and wearing on his head a black cap in shape not unlike the fez that is common in the East to-day. The man was past middle age, having a grizzled beard, sharp, hard features and quick eyes, which withal were not unkindly. He was a Phoenician merchant, much trusted by Hiram, the King of Tyre, who had made him captain of the ...
— Elissa • H. Rider Haggard
... date of the above letter a lad some fifteen years old was walking with a man of middle age on the shores of Lake Huron. Behind them was a large clearing of about a hundred acres in extent; a comfortable house, with buildings for cattle, stood at a distance of some three hundred yards from the lake; broad fields of yellow corn waved brightly in the sun; and from the edge of the clearing ...
— True to the Old Flag - A Tale of the American War of Independence • G. A. Henty
... Jew obsessed the imagination of the Middle Age. The tale, which an Armenian bishop first told at the Abbey of St. Albans, concerned a doorkeeper in the house of Pontius Pilate—or, as some say, a shoemaker in Jerusalem—who insulted Christ on His way to Calvary. He was told by Our Lord, "I will rest, but thou shalt ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... the sky, are several statues and other ancient sculptures; among them a statue of Julius Caesar, said to be the only authentic one, and certainly giving an impression of him more in accordance with his character than the withered old face in the museum; also, a statue of Augustus in middle age, still retaining a resemblance to the bust of him in youth; some gigantic heads and hands and feet in marble and bronze; a stone lion and horse, which lay long at the bottom of a river, broken and corroded, and were repaired by Michel Angelo; and other things which it were wearisome ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of middle age, wrapped at all times in dirty rags (not to be called clothing), obese, grimy, with dishevelled black hair, and hands so scarred, so deformed by labour and neglect, as to be scarcely human. She had the darkest and fiercest eyes I ever saw. Between ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... low-voiced but with a decided note of hilarity, took place at the door, and two women entered the car, one looking back and nodding a final smiling farewell before she gave her mind to the matter in hand. They were attractive women, of late middle age, perhaps, not yet to be called old. One was large, with fine curves, gray bands of hair under her autumnal bonnet, and a dignity of bearing which suited her ample figure and melodious, rather deep ...
— A Christmas Accident and Other Stories • Annie Eliot Trumbull
... things at Thebes—the strange malady of the women, the dancings, the arrival of the mysterious stranger: he finds all the women departed from the town, and sees Cadmus and Teiresias in masque. Like the exaggerated diabolical figures in some of the religious plays and imageries of the Middle Age, he is an impersonation of stupid impiety, one of those whom the gods willing to [67] destroy first infatuate. Alternating between glib unwisdom and coarse mockery, between violence and a pretence of moral austerity, he understands only the sorriest motives; thinks the ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... latter was intended to convey the idea of heat in that cold climate. Large buffalo-skins trimmed around the edges with red cloth cut into festoons, covered the back of the sleigh, and were spread over its bottom and drawn up around the feet of the travellers - one of whom was a man of middle age and the other a female just entering upon womanhood. The former was of a large stature; but the precautions he had taken to guard against the cold left but little of his person exposed to view. A great-coat, that was abundantly ornamented by a profusion of ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... a small village about ten miles from the New Jersey sea-coast. In this village she was born, here she had married and buried her husband, and here she expected somebody to bury her; but she was in no hurry for this, for she had scarcely reached middle age. She was a tall woman with no apparent fat in her composition, and full of activity, ...
— The Magic Egg and Other Stories • Frank Stockton
... I was right. Mr. Jameson was the proprietor of the hotel, and Mr. Jameson was a pleasant, refined, quiet man of middle age. He appeared from somewhere or other, ascertained our wants, stated that he had a few vacant rooms and ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... writer of this story, you have stood by the long tables, and watched the people seated there; the white-haired, watery-eyed old men, whose trembling hands can scarcely hold the gold they put down with such feverish eagerness; the men of middle age, whom experience has taught to play cautiously, and stop just before the tide of success turns against them; the young men, who, with the perspiration standing thickly about their pale lips, and a strange glitter in their feverish eyes as they see hundreds swept away, still play recklessly, ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... without fully penetrating into that of which we are conscious. I want to deepen and make clear to you this consciousness that the world has had essentially a Trinity of ages—the Classical Age, the Middle Age, the Modern Age; each of these embracing races and individuals of apparently enormous separation in kind, but united in the spirit of their age,—the Classical Age having its Egyptians and Ninevites, Greeks and Romans,—the Middle Age having its Goths and Franks, Lombards and ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... that I never seemed to want to speak if I could help it, to an audience all made up of women, like a Woman's Club, or all made up of men, or to an audience all made up of very young people or of very old people, or of people who presented a solid front of middle age. ...
— The Ghost in the White House • Gerald Stanley Lee
... on the other end of the bench. The flyer studied him bitterly. He had decent shoes, a warm coat, and that air of satisfaction with the world which is the result of economic security. Although he was well into middle age, the man had a compact grace of movement and ...
— The People of the Crater • Andrew North
... a bright English face, a lady in the years between youth and middle age, frank, gracious, her look of interest speaking a compliment which Otway found more ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... was almost exactly like its fellows, neither better nor worse; and the door was opened by a neat, prim woman, small, and of middle age. Commonplace she was, no doubt, but not ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... mere bachelor, drifting toward what I now see to be a tragic middle age. I had become so accustomed to smoke issuing from my mouth that I felt incomplete without it; indeed, the time came when I could refrain from smoking if doing nothing else, but hardly during the hours of toil. To lay aside my pipe was to ...
— My Lady Nicotine - A Study in Smoke • J. M. Barrie
... Helen's peculiar character. As she sat there, the sun shining on her fair face—still fair; a clear, healthy red and white, though she was over forty—you might trace some harsh lines in it, and see clearly that, save for her exceeding unselfishness and lovingness of disposition, Mrs. Bruce might in middle age have grown into what is termed a "hard" woman; capable of passionate affection, but of equally passionate severity, and prone to exercise both alike upon the beings most precious ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... powerful, and his head erect. He had not been born a cripple, but had been disabled for life, when a tiny child, by a cart passing over his legs above the knees. He was talking to a lad a year or so younger than himself, while a strong, hearty-looking woman, somewhat past middle age, stood at a wash-tub. ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... had gradually been creating a style which the critics of Germany have declared to be their first luminous model of precision and elegance. Thus a Hebrew vagrant, first perplexed in the voluminous labyrinth of Judaical learning, in his middle age oppressed by indigence and malady, and in his mature life wrestling with that commercial station whence he derived his humble independence, became one of the master-writers in the literature of his country. The history of the mind of Mendelssohn ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... enormous. "I shall never again make so great a sacrifice for the younger generation," he says in a letter, "I am amazed to note how insignificant, how almost nil is the effect produced, in comparison to the cost, in vitality to me. Or perhaps it is I who am in error. Perhaps one must have reached middle age, or the Indian Summer of life, must have seen much, heard much, felt and produced much and been much in solitude to receive in reading what I gave in writing 'with ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... free and open as the expanse of the firmament. We hope, therefore, the gospel, the real gospel, is as unlike the views of some of its interpreters, as creation, in all its boundless extent and beauty, is unlike the paltry scheme of some wretched scholastic in the middle ages. The middle age of science and civilization is now terminated; but Christianity also had its middle age, and this, perhaps, is not yet fully terminated. There is still a remainder of the old spell, even the spell of human authority, and by which a certain cramp or confinement has been laid on the ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... learned something about the couple who had preceded us in the use of these rooms. They were of middle age and of great personal elegance, but uncertain pay, the husband being nothing more nor less than a professional gambler. Their name ...
— The Gray Madam - 1899 • Anna Katharine Green (Mrs. Charles Rohlfs)
... with such beautiful society. I did not follow her advice to chain either of them with iron, for I found cords of love, the only instrument white men know the use of, quite strong enough. Fascinated with this speech, she said she would give me another of a middle age between the two, expecting, as I thought, that she would thus induce me to visit her more frequently than I did her son; but, though I thanked her, it frightened me from ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... New-Englanders, or descendants of the puritans, whether born east of the Hudson or not. And, certainly, no class of men were ever better fitted for an occupation, than were those for "peddling." The majority of them were young men, too; for the "Yankee" who lives beyond middle age, without providing snug quarters for the decline of life, is usually not even fit for a peddler. But, though often not advanced in years, they often exhibited qualities, which one would have expected to find only in men of age and experience. They could "calculate," with the most absolute ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... Agora. These all, in greater or lesser degrees, work powerfully together to make the citizen. They work most powerfully, of course, in those plastic unsettled years that last from adolescence to the middle twenties, but often in very slowly diminishing intensity right into the closing decades of middle age. However things may have been in the quieter past when newspapers did not exist, when creeds were rigid, plays mere spectacles to be seen only "in Town," and books rare, the fact remains that to-day everybody goes much further and learns far more than any ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... on which to sit enthroned, a sufficiency of new gowns, a maid, cigarettes, breakfast in bed, and a supply of French novels, she appeared the most harmless and engaging of mortals. Her youth had been cruel, disorderly, and vicious. It had lasted long; but now, when middle age stood at last confessed, she was lapsing, it seemed, into amiability and good behavior. She was, indeed, fast forgetting her own history, and soon the recital of it would surprise no one so much ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... near their head-quarters, where resides the Sheik of all the Beni Amers, Ahmed, surrounded by his wives, children, and people. He is a man of middle age, conspicuous among his cunning followers by a shrewd and crafty look. He was friendly to us, and presented us with a few sheep and cows. His camp covered several acres of ground, the whole enclosed by a strong fence; the wigwams are built ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc
... talked together, the door opened softly and the caretaker entered, accompanied by a short, paunchy man with a very red face and eyes which were black, small and suspicious. He was a man well past middle age, but he seemed to be making a bluff at thirty-five. His hair, which had turned white at the temples, and his ...
— Boy Scouts in the Coal Caverns • Major Archibald Lee Fletcher
... still living, an aged lunatic, at Windsor, completely impervious to the impressions of the outer world. Of his seven sons, the youngest was of more than middle age, and none had legitimate offspring. The outlook, therefore, was ambiguous. It seemed highly improbable that the Prince Regent, who had lately been obliged to abandon his stays, and presented a preposterous figure of debauched obesity, could ever again, even on the supposition ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... think of retiring when past middle age with shaken nerves and a growing appreciation of golf. Not while he could ride a buck-jumper, handle a hog spear or a polo stick, and shoot straight. The thrill of tracking a wild beast to its lair ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... presently advancing footsteps, he dropped into a chair, and leaning back and shutting his eyes, assumed an expression of pain and lassitude. In a moment the door of the room was opened, and a comely woman of middle age entered, ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... of mind and emotion from which no lessons may be learned—calm, stagnant pools of superlative surface pleasure. No one learns things worth while when he is too happy or too successful. That is why success is a wiser and more enduring thing when it comes at middle age. The young man or woman has not been tried out, has not had to struggle and discover personal limitations. It's the ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... Infidel and a Mussulman, to Constantinople and every other part of Turkey which came within my observation; and more faithful in peril, or indefatigable in service, are rarely to be found. The Infidel was named Basilius; the Moslem, Dervish Tahiri; the former a man of middle age, and the latter about my own. Basili was strictly charged by Ali Pacha in person to attend us; and Dervish was one of fifty who accompanied us through the forests of Acarnania to the banks of Achelous, and onward to Messalonghi in AEtolia. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... all appearances a mandarin, of middle age, was garbed in a stiff, dark satin gown, heavy with gold and jewels which flashed brightly in the light of a camp-fire. His severe, dark face was long, and stamped with intelligence of a high order. He wore a mustache which drooped down to form a hair wisp on either ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... of the house, they proceeded to the spot in front of the store where the trading business was transacted. Captain Mackintosh, a fine-looking man of middle age, and two of his clerks, stood on one side, a quantity of goods piled up near them; while on the other was seen an Indian chief, standing near several bales of peltries, and attended by a band of nearly twenty followers. His appearance was picturesque in the extreme. His ...
— The Frontier Fort - Stirring Times in the N-West Territory of British America • W. H. G. Kingston
... is so, Sir Edmund," answered Sir John Clavering, a stout, dark man of middle age. "This girl of mine is very heady, as I give warning you will find out when she is your wife. For years she has set her fancy upon Hugh de Cressi; yes, since they were boy and girl together, as I think, and while he lives I doubt she'll never ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard
... of men and women. A broad plain swept from the mountain's foot, a forest broke its sweep, and the ocean thundered near. The people were clad in garments made from the feathered skins of birds, and were all past middle age. The foot of the mountain was ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... excitement since the day of the regiment," observed the keeper of the Inn, a well-mannered and well-educated gentleman, above middle age, who held the enviable position of inn-keeper and lawyer alike. Every inn-keeper of this age commanded much of respect in the community, for it was he who received the money of the people, and money commanded the necessities of ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... she feared, made her look "too natural." Having, therefore, discarded these notions, her fancy roved in the realms of the beautiful and fantastic, until it settled down upon a costume which, bespangled and with its garland of rushes, she declared to be that of a "mermaid of middle age." Nobody was in a condition to contradict her, inasmuch as nobody recollected ever having seen a "middle-aged" mermaid before. She floated, as a matter of fact, in a cloud of pink and sea-green laces. The ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... fully realize the conditions which obtain in the world as we find ourselves at the threshold of our middle age as a Nation. We have emerged full grown as a peer in the great concourse of nations. We have passed through various formative periods. We have been self-centered in the struggle to develop our domestic resources ...
— State of the Union Addresses of William H. Taft • William H. Taft
... A Man of middle age, whose hair was turning grey, had two Sweethearts, an old woman and a young one. The elder of the two didn't like having a lover who looked so much younger than herself; so, whenever he came to see her, she used to pull the dark ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... days of Henry III.'s reign, a modest alien invasion anticipated the more noisy coming of the Poitevin or the Provencal. The most remarkable development of the "religious" life that the later middle age was to witness had just been worked out in Italy. St. Francis of Assisi had taught the cult of absolute poverty, and his example held up to his followers the ideal of the thorough and literal imitation of ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... ruthless habits, and adopt the design of serving for a little time under the banner of the Commonwealth, before he completely gave up the sea, had not his declining constitution warned him that at fifty-five he was older than at thirty. He had grown a wiser and a better man than when, in middle age, he ran full tilt with his passions at all things that impeded his progress or his views. A long and dangerous illness, off the Caribbees, had sobered him more in one little month, than any other event could have done in years. ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... time may be said to have been waiting for its master-novelist. Five years had gone by since the good and great Sir Walter Scott had been laid to rest in Dryburgh Abbey, there to sleep, as is most fit, amid the ruins of that old Middle Age world he loved so well, with the babble of the Tweed for lullaby. Nor had any one shown himself of stature to step into his vacant place, albeit Bulwer, more precocious even than Dickens, was already known as the author of "Pelham," "Eugene Aram," and the "Last Days of Pompeii;" ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... Meanwhile the middle age accomplished its own work. Slowly and obscurely, amid stupidity and ignorance, were being forged the nations and the languages of Europe. Italy, France, Spain, England, Germany took shape. The actors of the future drama acquired their several characters, and formed the ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... a good thing that the invisible world is so thoroughly shut out from this. The effect of too vivid a conception of it is never wholesome. It was pernicious in the middle age, and clairvoyance and spirit-rapping would be great evils to the world, if it were not that the spirits, even of-the ablest men, in losing their bodies seem to lose their wits. It is well that it is so, for if Washington Irving dictated to a medium accounts ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... rudely irrupted himself was a man of middle age, wearing a coarse pea-jacket and blue jersey of a seaman, his peaked hat covered with dust, as Bones perceived later, when the sound of ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... platform made of heavy planks and all the slaves was lined up on the platform, and they was stripped to the waist, men, women, and children. One or two of the women folks was bare naked. They wasn't young women neither, just middle age ones, but they was built good. Some of them was well greased and that grease covered up many a scar they'd earned for some foolishment ...
— Slave Narratives, Oklahoma - A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From - Interviews with Former Slaves • Various
... and this 'pleasant medicine,' we hear, pleased the child, and he drank a great deal of it daily. Though at the time it seemed to suit him, yet there is little doubt it planted the seeds of the disease which was to carry him off before middle age. ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... pushed through the outer edge of the crowd, a battered wreck of a man past middle age was being lifted into the ambulance. His eyes were closed, his face a dead, chalky white, and ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... sentimental view of the thing himself. He turned to the waiter to give some order, and as he did so, his eyes encountered two more people, a man and a woman, who, at that moment, entered the dining-room. The man was somewhat past middle age, with a large bald head, covered with a shining dome of yellow skin, and a yellow face lighted by a pair of deep-sunk dark eyes. The whole was set off and rendered sinister by a small hook nose and a little black moustache. For the rest, the man was short and inclined to ...
— The Mystery of the Four Fingers • Fred M. White
... and grow strong within its heart? Considered in its unity as interesting mankind, the question was, shall the Reformation, developed to the fulness of Free Inquiry, succeed in its protest against the Middle Age? ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... it a kind of reprieve when she heard from Mr. Strafford that they might delay their journey safely for a month. The sober middle age which had come upon her before its time, as her life rolled on out of the anguish and tumult of the past, made home and quietness the most desirable things on earth to her, and her health and spirits, neither ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 2 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... restored to that land which probably, although long severed from its glens and mountains, he had not ceased to love. He was now of middle age, being in his forty-fifth year; but his disposition, in spite of his long residence among foreigners, was still thoroughly Scotch. He was as undaunted by danger as any of his valiant ancestors had been, consequently he had no need to have recourse to guile; in short, ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... Hachilah, and both times he refuses nobly to use his opportunity. He is his master, the Lord's Anointed; and his person is sacred in the eyes of David his servant—his knight, as he would have been called in the Middle Age. The second time David's temptation is a terrible one. He has softened Saul's wild heart by his courtesy and pathos when he pleaded with him, after letting him escape from the cave; and he has sworn to Saul that when he becomes king he will never cut off his children, or destroy his ...
— David • Charles Kingsley
... effecting a cure, even so men, for the accomplishment of their acts, use their intelligence, aided by their own wisdom. What they do is again disapproved by others. A man, in youth, is affected by one kind of understanding. In middle age, the same does not prevail with him, and in the period of decay, a different kind of understanding becomes agreeable to him. When fallen into terrible distress or when visited by great prosperity, the understanding of a person, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... Father Dempsey, Barney Doran, and Matthew Haffigan come from the house. Doran is a stout bodied, short armed, roundheaded, red-haired man on the verge of middle age, of sanguine temperament, with an enormous capacity for derisive, obscene, blasphemous, or merely cruel and senseless fun, and a violent and impetuous intolerance of other temperaments and other opinions, all this representing energy and capacity wasted and demoralized ...
— John Bull's Other Island • George Bernard Shaw
... a pleasant-looking man, of middle age, named Murdock; very different in his manners and bearing from Mr. ...
— Fame and Fortune - or, The Progress of Richard Hunter • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... at Barker's yesterday. Before dinner, sat with several other persons in the stoop of the tavern. There was B——, J. A. Chandler, Clerk of the Court, a man of middle age or beyond, two or three stage people, and, nearby, a negro, whom they call "the Doctor," a crafty-looking fellow, one of whose occupations is nameless. In presence of this goodly company, a man of a depressed, neglected air, a soft, simple-looking fellow, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... which they were made gave a grotesque and savage appearance to the wearers. Light fitting buckskin leggings, fringed on the outer side, encased their legs, and a pair of deerskin mittens dangled from the ends of a string which was slung around the neck. One of the men was past middle age, the other a ...
— Ungava Bob - A Winter's Tale • Dillon Wallace
... was answered, not, as usual, by the silent servant Peter, but by a woman of middle age, very quietly and neatly dressed, whom I had once or twice met on the way to and from my room, and of whose exact position in the house I ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... Pierre and the girls in showing him Gresham's collection; evidently they all knew it almost as well as their own. After a while, Irene Gresham ushered in Philip Cabot. He, too, was past middle age, with prematurely white hair and a thin, scholarly face. According to Hollywood type-casting, he might have been a professor, or a judge, or a Boston ...
— Murder in the Gunroom • Henry Beam Piper
... speculations and abstractions of philosophy and creeds, the Mason is also to continue engaged in the active duties of this great warfare of life. He is not only a Moralist and Philosopher, but a Soldier, the Successor of those Knights of the Middle Age, who, while they wore the Cross, also wielded the Sword, and were the Soldiers of Honor, Loyalty, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... parents, those old Evangelicals. No just and well-informed man who has passed middle age, but must confess, that to them we owe whatsoever vital religion exists at this moment in any school or party of the Church of England; that to them we owe the germs at least, and in many cases the full organization and the final ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... mentioned were seen walking on the spar deck forward. The man was well past middle age, of fine, rather sharp features and with thick gray hair. The woman did not appear to be ...
— Dave Darrin After The Mine Layers • H. Irving Hancock
... waves, and good-evening with those which are leaving. It will lead your thoughts pleasantly away, upwards to its source, downwards to the stream to which it is tributary, or the wide waters in which it is to lose itself. A river, by choice, to live by in middle age. ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... town. He was shown into a room where the two ladies were waiting for him. They had been some four or five years younger than his father, a fact of which he was not aware; and instead of being elderly women, as he expected, he found, by their appearance, they were scarcely entering middle age. They were evidently ...
— With Kitchener in the Soudan - A Story of Atbara and Omdurman • G. A. Henty
... school, how to behave at church, &c., but it does not go into the great detail as to Meals and Dress which is the special value of Russell's Boke, nor is it associated with a writer who tells us something of himself, or a noble who in all our English Middle Age has so bright a name on which we can look back as "good Duke Humphrey." This personality adds an interest to work that anonymity and its writings of equal value can never have; so that we may be well content ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... sulfurous Fire; On each hand slaughter and gigantic deeds. In other part the scepter'd Haralds call To Council in the Citie Gates: anon Grey-headed men and grave, with Warriours mixt, Assemble, and Harangues are heard, but soon In factious opposition, till at last 660 Of middle Age one rising, eminent In wise deport, spake much of Right and Wrong, Of Justice, of Religion, Truth and Peace, And Judgement from above: him old and young Exploded, and had seiz'd with violent hands, Had not a Cloud descending snatch'd him thence Unseen amid the throng: so violence Proceeded, and ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... babes,'" said Mrs. Valentin, laughing gently. "I own it, dear. Middle age is suspicious and mean and unspiritual and troubled about many things. A middle-aged mother is like an old hen when hawks are sailing around; she can't see ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... was soon carried to Richelieu. The vigilance of that minister was here further roused by jealousy. He, too, either from vanity or politics, had ventured to pay his addresses to the queen. But a priest, past middle age, of a severe character, and occupied in the most extensive plans of ambition or vengeance, was but an unequal match, in that contest, for a young courtier, entirely disposed to gayety and gallantry. The cardinal's disappointment strongly inclined him to counterwork the amorous projects ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... steep, and required care even in our own descent; but for a man who had climbed mountains, as I had done in my youth, it could hardly be called difficult even in middle age. By the time we had got again into the valley road I was all but convinced of the practicability of the proposal. I was a little vexed, however, I must confess, that a stranger should have thought of giving such a pleasure to Connie, when the bare ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... an English aristocrat and lady, a Seattle lawyer, sober, thoughtful and of middle age, who had been introduced to me by a friend upon sailing, and who kindly kept me in sight when we changed steamers or trains on the trip without specially appearing to do so; a nice old gentleman going to ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... grown keener in her sharp middle age. As it played about her, Harriett cowered; it was like being exposed, naked, to a cutting wind. Her mind ran back to her father and mother, longing, like a child, for their shelter and support, for ...
— Life and Death of Harriett Frean • May Sinclair
... man the common belief about him. But there is ample proof of the error of this. From middle age, though he ever liked a horse race, he was a regular if not a devout churchman. He did not swear at all, "by the Eternal" or any other oath. When he reached New Orleans in 1814 to take command of the army, ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... me of Stonehenge, I don't know why. Lady Glenmire came to the rescue of our hostess, and, somehow or other, we found ourselves for the first time placed agreeably, and not formally, in Mrs Jamieson's house. Lady Glenmire, now we had time to look at her, proved to be a bright little woman of middle age, who had been very pretty in the days of her youth, and who was even yet very pleasant-looking. I saw Miss Pole appraising her dress in the first five minutes, and I take her word when she said ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... letting their minds wander on into whatever paths association led them. This is known as the free-association method, and simple as it seems, is one of the most effective in uncovering memories which have been forgotten for years. One of my patients, a refined, highly educated woman of middle age, had suffered for two years with almost constant nausea. One day, after a long talk, with no suggestion on my part, only an occasional, "What does that remind you of?" she told with great emotion an experience which she had had at eighteen ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury |
