"Infantine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... some gentle and sweet emotion. His winged children are the loveliest ideal beings ever created by the human mind. These are generally, whether in the capacity of Cherubim or Cupid, accessories to the rest of the picture; and the underplot of their lovely and infantine play is something almost pathetic from the excess of its unpretending beauty. One of the best of his pieces is an Annunciation of the Virgin:—the Angel is beaming in beauty; the Virgin, ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... then? A child most infantine, Yet wandering far beyond that innocent age In all but its sweet looks and mien divine; Even then, methought, with the world's tyrant rage A patient warfare thy young heart did wage, 860 When those soft eyes of scarcely conscious ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... of this school for reading were only five shillings a quarter, and it was evidently less with a view to the boy's advance in learning than as a cheap mode of keeping him quiet that his mother had sent him to it. Of the progress of his infantine studies at Aberdeen, as well under Mr. Bowers as under the various other persons that instructed him, we have the following interesting particulars communicated by himself, in a sort of journal which he once began, under the title of "My ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... and Hymns we have never forgotten even amidst all the cares and crosses of after life. How often and how fondly too have we lingered over their delightful pages; and it may be questioned whether any works ever produced a better or more lasting impression on the infantine mind—than these unassuming little volumes. Mrs. Barbauld's present article is entitled "the Misses, addressed to a careless girl"—as the Misses Chief, Management, Lay, Place, Understanding, Representation, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 395, Saturday, October 24, 1829. • Various
... thought familiar to savage tribes that to us, trained through long centuries of progressive knowledge, seems in the highest degree absurd and even incomprehensible. As a matter of every-day practice we cannot, if we would, go back to that infantine state of mind which regards not only our fellow men and women, but all objects animate and inanimate around us, as instinct with a consciousness, a personality akin to our own. This, however, is the savage philosophy of things. To a large proportion ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... generation of the fauns; like fauns, they combine a certain savage wildness, a dithyrambic ecstasy of inspiration, a delight in rapid movement as they revel amid clouds or flowers, with the permanent and all-pervading sweetness of the master's style. When infantine or childlike, these celestial sylphs are scarcely to be distinguished for any noble quality of beauty from Murillo's cherubs, and are far less divine than the choir of children who attend Madonna in Titian's 'Assumption.' ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... closed over a dear friend, the friend of my youth. Still she is present with me, and I hear her soft voice warbling as I stray over the heath. Fate has separated me from another, the fire of whose eyes, tempered by infantine tenderness, still warms my breast; even when gazing on these tremendous cliffs sublime emotions absorb my soul. And, smile not, if I add that the rosy tint of morning reminds me of a suffusion which will never more charm my senses, unless it reappears on the cheeks of my child. Her sweet blushes ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... dais borne by four religious in dalmatics accompanied by the community and by several strangers singing hymns and canticles. Numbers of children preceeded the Blessed Sacrament, exercising the solemn functions which had been allotted to them. This infantine band, clad in white surplices girded with different colors, resembled angels and presented a spectacle at once beautiful and edifying to the beholder. The Protestants who were present appeared to be ...
— Memoir • Fr. Vincent de Paul
... with him during his morning ablutions; saw him splash and kick in the water with the infantine exuberance that mothers love to behold, fondly deeming that no baby ever so splashed or so kicked before; saw him arrayed in his pretty blue-braided frock, and dainty lace-bedizened cambric pinafore. What a wealth of ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... thought that the mighty change that the death of your mother had wrought within me had rendered me callous to any future impression. I saw the lovely and I did not love, I imagined therefore that all warmth was extinguished in my heart except that which led me ever to dwell on your then infantine image. ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... joy that was almost infantine, agreed to catechize the old man and confer with him twice a week. Thus the conversion attributed to Ursula and to a spirit of sordid calculation, was the spontaneous act of the doctor himself. The abbe, who for fourteen years had abstained from touching ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... struck by the men's extraordinary isolation of mind; you may not understand his thought now, but, when you visit the North Sea, the meaning will flash on you. Isolation—that is the word; the men know little of the world; they are infantine without being petty; they have no curiosity about the passage of events on shore, and their solid world is represented by an area of 70 feet by 18. They are always amusing, always suggestive, and always superhumanly ignorant of the commonest concerns that affect the lives of ordinary men. ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... Palestrina, whom he contrasts with the mountainous fuguists of "Saxe-Gotha" and elsewhere, probably had for him the same kind of charm as the early painters of Florence. Out of that "infancy," however, there had arisen no "titanically infantine" Michelangelo, but a race of accomplished petits maitres, whose characteristic achievement was the opera of the rococo age. A Goldsmith or a Sterne can make the light songs of their contemporaries eloquent even to us of gracious amenities and cultivated charm; but Browning, ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... chesnut horse, going at a rapid pace up an inclined plane, like an individual in white trousers presenting a young lady in book muslin with an infantine specimen of the canine species?—Because he is giving a gallop ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 7, 1841 • Various
... the rising of the waters filled the mansion wherein Patrick abided, and overturned all the household stuff, and caused all the vessels to swim. And the little boy, being an hungered, asked in his infantine manner for bread; yet found he not any who would break bread for him, but jeeringly was he answered that he was nearer to being drowned than fed. When the boy dipped three of his fingers into the swelling water, and, standing on a dry place, he thrice ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various
... These compositions were, there is no doubt, designed for the theatre; and they were represented at Ferrara and at Turin with great pomp, and we may presume with eminent taste. This fact, however, serves to give us an idea of the infantine state of the theatre at that time; although, as a whole, they have each their plot and catastrophe, the action nevertheless stands still in some scenes. Their popularity, therefore, would lead us to conclude ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... weeklies, where well-known politicians were represented with large heads and small extremities. Artistic by nature, and with an eye to form, he had never admired the Baroness's type of beauty, which was the theme of admiration for nearly every other man in Beryngford. Her face, with its infantine colouring, its large, innocent azure eyes, and its short retrousse features, he conceded to be captivatingly pretty, however, and it seemed unusually so this evening. Perhaps because he had so recently looked upon the sharp, sallow face ...
— An Ambitious Man • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... emigrants—darker in complexion, but finer in feature and more graceful in form—not so strong, and fading sooner. Many of the children are perfectly beautiful, but the cherub beauty changes soon, and the women particularly look old and withered while yet young in years. Infantine beauty seems peculiar to the country, for even the children of emigrants born there are much handsomer than those born at home. Such are some of the traits of the natives—then comes the wide circle of emigrants, each (at least the older ones) retaining the peculiarities of their different countries. ...
— Sketches And Tales Illustrative Of Life In The Backwoods Of New Brunswick • Mrs. F. Beavan
... saw before. Opening a desk, he took out something carefully enclosed between two layers of cotton-wool, on removing which there appeared a little baby's hand most delicately represented in the whitest marble; all the dimples where the knuckles were to be, all the creases in the plump flesh, every infantine wrinkle of the soft skin being lovingly recorded. "The critics condemn minute representation," said Powers; "but you may look at this through a microscope and see if it injures the general effect." Nature herself never made a prettier or truer little hand. It was the hand ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Methuselah! He is en affaire regime with the young Lady Essex. At a supper there a few nights ago of two-and-twenty people, they were talking of his going to Cashiobury to direct some alterations: Mrs. Nugent in the softest infantine voice called out, "My Lady Essex, don't let him do any thing out of doors; but you will find ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... and modern adventures and modern people, there is still a gray, piercing lyrical note in it that is almost primitive, and reflects the childlike singleness and intensity of the animating spirit. The man who shaped not only the deliberately infantine "Ma Mere l'Oye," but also things as quiveringly simple and expressive and songful as "Oiseaux tristes," as "Sainte," as "Le Gibet," or the "Sonatine," as the passacaglia of the Trio or the vocal interlude in "Daphnis et Chloe," ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... Pope to his ducal title; and the reader may imagine the little allowance that would be made by a haughty and angry prince for the rebellious courtesy thus shewn to a detested rival. Tasso, furthermore, who had not only an infantine hatred of bitter "physic," but reasonably thought the fashion of the age for giving it a ridiculous one, begged hard, in a manner which it is humiliating to witness, that he might not be drenched with medicine. The ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... mean so," murmured Lu. "They have a color of their own, almost human, infantine; and when you mass them, the tone is more soft and mellow than a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... could not leave the slightest hope to the prince. A last proof was reserved for him. At length he cast his eyes on the miniature, which he had almost feared to look at. The blow was frightful. In this infantine and charming face, already radiant with that divine beauty which belongs to the cherubim, he recognized in a striking manner the features of Fleur-de-Marie; her Grecian nose, her noble forehead, her little mouth; already slightly serious. For, said Madame ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... gets into her teens, and her self-consciousness is born. After a certain interval passed in infantine helplessness it begins to act. Simple, young, and inexperienced at first. Persons of observation can tell to a nicety how old this consciousness is by the skill it has acquired in the art necessary to its success—the art of hiding itself. Generally begins career by actions which are ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... using his right hand muffler like an infantine boxing-glove, and punishing his chest for being ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... comparatively few, and business and pleasure to unite in the town itself. The imagination also may have some share in giving the preference, particularly after reading[9] M. de Ruffigny's tirade against his infantine life in the silk mills of Lyons. One fancies the merchant conversant with a higher and less sordid class of persons and details than the master spinner, and vineyards more agreeable objects than dying-houses and treddles. ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... sometimes strangely led up to its task in life. Almost from infancy the sickly boy had to don the soldier's uniform. All joyous sprightliness was crushed out of the infantine heir of a barbarous Imperialism. His education by the crowned corporal who happened to be his parent, appeared to aim mainly at making him physically and in character as rigid as a ramrod. By nature of a sensuous bent, he had to undergo ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... keen, half dreamy, as in Geraldine, his junior by one year; while the grace of all the attitudes of his slender lissome figure showed to advantage beside Felix's more sturdy form, and deliberate or downright movements; while Clement was paler, slighter, and with rather infantine features, and shining wavy brown hair, that nothing ever seemed to ruffle, looked so much as if he ought to have been a girl, that Tina, short for Clementina, was his school name. Fulbert, stout, square, fat-cheeked, and permanently rough ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... would fling away a ribbon if he had one; and from the earliest age, sitting up in her little chair by the great fireplace opposite to the corner where Lady Castlewood commonly sat at her embroidery, would utter infantine sarcasms about the favor shown to her brother. These, if spoken in the presence of Lord Castlewood, tickled and amused his humor; he would pretend to love Frank best, and dandle and kiss him, and roar with laughter at Beatrix's ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... us adhere to our early friendships, even when not sanctioned by our maturer judgment. Madame de la F———— never became entirely divested of the effects of a convent education; but if she retained a love of trifling amusements, and a sort of infantine gaiety, she likewise continued pious, charitable, and strictly attentive not only to the duties, but to the decorum, essential in the female character and merits of this sort are, I believe, now more rare than those in which she ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... treasures the woods and hillsides yielded that "would do for Tommy." Surrounded by playthings such as never child out of fairyland had before, it is to be hoped that Tommy was content. He appeared to be serenely happy, albeit there was an infantine gravity about him, a contemplative light in his round gray eyes, that sometimes worried Stumpy. He was always tractable and quiet, and it is recorded that once, having crept beyond his "corral,"—a ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... overcome all temptations, his fanaticism is now militant and conquering. This is certainly not the same man, but perhaps one of his listeners, this old King David of Donatello—a man at no time intelligent, whose dome-shaped head has taken back, with the thin white floss hair that recalls infancy, an infantine lack of solidity; whose mouth is drooping already, perhaps after a first experience of paralysis, and his eyes getting vague in look; but who, in this intellectual and physical decay, seems to have become only the more full of gentleness ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... had, certainly, a spell that was something in excess of what may be called their "face-value." Though legal manhood was so soon to be his status, he had still some of the radiance of childhood about him. His hair was of the same pure and infantine gold that it had been when he charged down on the Eldest Statesman on the stepping-stones of the Ownashee; his blue eyes had lost none of their candour; the touch of gilding on his upper lip was effective only at short range, but, when taken in connection with a very white and even set ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... silence and solitude of her chamber. She is thinking aloud; it is the young heart "triumphing to itself in words." In the midst of all the vehemence with which she calls upon the night to bring Romeo to her arms, there is something so almost infantine in her perfect simplicity, so playful and fantastic in the imagery and language, that the charm of sentiment and innocence is thrown over the whole; and her impatience, to use her own expression, is truly that of "a child before a festival, that hath new robes and may not wear them." ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... castle he deviated from his homeward track by turning down the familiar little lane which led to the ruined castle of the Red King. It took him past the cottage in which the new Avice was born, from whose precincts he had heard her first infantine cry. Pausing he saw near the west behind him the new moon growing distinct upon ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... swimming up behind them on old Van Ammerer's arm. They were headed for the paddock, although it was not quite time for the saddling bell. The Heathflower thing was still invisible—Allys searched the course for her through Hilary's glass, saying the while over her shoulder, with her most infantine smile: "You thought right, Camilla dear. I don't really know anything—have only a parrot faculty ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... recollections dated from his stay with his parents in garrison in Jersey. This must have been about the year 1811 or 1812, when he was therefore two or three years old. He used to say he remembered the relieving of guard in Jersey; that he had an infantine recollection of a military guard-room by night; and remembered a "Lady Fanny," the wife, as he believed, of the colonel of the regiment, who showed some slight kindness towards him and ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... infantine complexion which only accompanies red hair; his eyes were brightly blue; his features well chiselled, with the exception of the lips, which were clumsily cut and loosely held together. He came down to breakfast in a not very ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... more tenaciously (for there are Names that have lasted nigh thirty centuries) than the very skin. And now from without, what mystic influences does it not send inwards, even to the centre; especially in those plastic first-times, when the whole soul is yet infantine, soft, and the invisible seedgrain will grow to be an all overshadowing tree! Names? Could I unfold the influence of Names, which are the most important of all Clothings, I were a second greater Trismegistus. Not only all common ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... associate them, —to think in a certain manner,—to judge well or ill. They point out to him various objects, which they accustom him either to love or to hate, to desire or to avoid, to esteem or to despise. It is thus opinions are transmitted from fathers, mothers, nurses, and masters, to man in his infantine state. It is thus, that his mind by degrees saturates itself with truth, or fills itself with error; after which he regulates his conduct, which renders him either happy or miserable, virtuous or vicious, estimable or hateful. It is thus he becomes either contented or discontented ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... think, and will think, and must think," Adela prattled some persuasive infantine nonsense: her soul all the while in revolt against her sisters, who left her the work to do, and took the position of spectators and critics, condemning an effort they had not ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... was a silky, dark, but exquisitely modulated gray, deepening to black in his paws and muzzle. His fur was excessively long, thick, and soft as eider-down, the cushions of flesh beneath perfectly infantine in their texture and contour. He was so very young that the palms of his half-human feet were still tender as a baby's. Except for the bright blue, steely hooks, half sheathed in his little toes, there was not a single harsh outline or detail in his plump figure. He was as free from angles as ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... spoken to the intellect as much as the elaborate realizations of color. Such a thought as this is something far above all art; it is epic poetry of the highest order. Claude, in subjects of the same kind, commonly introduces people carrying red trunks with iron locks about, and dwells, with infantine delight, on the lustre of the leather and the ornaments of the iron. The intellect can have no occupation here; we must look to the imitation or to nothing. Consequently, Turner rises above Claude in the very first instant of the conception of his picture, and acquires an intellectual superiority ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... about and spoke as usual, a close observer might have discerned a difference between this apparent calm, which was the effect of restraining energy, and the sweet genuine calm of the months when she first felt a return of her infantine happiness. ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... nor ever will— Is it this thought which makes her mien so still, Her features so fatigued, her eyes, though sweet, So sunk, so rarely lifted save to meet Her children's? She moves slow; her voice alone Hath yet an infantine and silver tone, But even that comes languidly; in truth, She seems one dying in a mask of youth. And now she will go home, and softly lay Her laughing children in their beds, and play Awhile with them ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... the tears that were still on her cheek, gave an infantine and involuntary smile, like a ray of sunshine through rain. Then, suddenly blushing deeply, she hastily took refuge in ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... has always reduced himself as nearly as possible to this condition of infantine sight. He sees the colours of nature exactly as they are, and therefore perceives at once in the sunlighted grass the precise relation between the two colours that form its shade and light. To him it does not seem shade and light, but bluish green ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... frequent in the Venetian pictures): sometimes a goldfinch, as in Raphael's Madonna del Cardellino. In a Madonna by Guercino, the Mother holds a bird perched on her hand, and the Child, with a most naive infantine expression, shrinks back from it.[1] In a picture by Baroccio, he holds it up before a cat (Nat. Gal. 29), so completely were the original symbolism and all the religious proprieties of art at this ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... sat next to her was the youngest of her two daughters, and might be about thirteen years of age. Her name was Matilda, but infantine circumstances had invested her with the nickname of Mimmy, by which her mother always called her. A nice, pretty, playful little girl was Mimmy Thompson, wearing two long tails of plaited hair hanging, behind her head, and inclined ...
— The Chateau of Prince Polignac • Anthony Trollope
... something among the apple-blossoms,—and now a Java dove comes whirring down and settles on her finger,—and we, that have seen pictures, think, as we look on her girlish face, with its lines of statuesque beauty, on the tremulous, half-infantine expression of her lovely mouth, and the general air of simplicity and purity, of some old pictures of the girlhood of the Virgin. But Mrs. Scudder was thinking of no such Popish matter, I can assure you,—not she! I don't think you could have done her a greater indignity than to mention ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... entirely different from his sisters. For Annet and Linnet merely looked puzzled; to them the book was a book, just as the hill upon which they sat was a hill, and they had never troubled their heads about such a thing as an author. But Matthew Henry opened his infantine eyes ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... found behind the image what I had left there and presently guessed that it was I. They had seen me every day going thither. I believe that God, who lets nothing pass without a recompense, soon rewarded me with interest for this little infantine devotion. ...
— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon
... the horse; total blindness after sunset—although the moon shines bright to others, to me it is total darkness—and nearly blind during the day; my limbs so weak and painful that I am obliged to be carried about; my body reduced to that of a living skeleton, and my strength that of infantine weakness —a sad, sad wreck of ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... appropriate him in feminine fashion, as a chosen idol and graven image. She gave him at once all her slender stock of infantine treasures, and seemed to watch with an ecstatic devotion his every movement,—often repeating, as she looked delightedly ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... loud thunder rolling, The bees that humm'd round the tall vine-mantled tree: The smooth water's margin whereon we were strolling When evening painted its mirror for me? And shall I return to this scenery never? These objects of infantine glory and love,— O tell me, my dear Guardian Angel, that ever Floats nigh me,—safe guide ...
— Delineations of the Ox Tribe • George Vasey
... said, that the infantine disease excited by milk of a deleterious, or simply impoverished quality, "grows by what it feeds on;" and we shall witness the internal debility and the infantine disorder running their course together. Tabes is the natural consequence of this ...
— Remarks on the Subject of Lactation • Edward Morton
... European treatise on philological questions which is now extant—the "Cratylus" of Plato,—as might be expected from its authorship, contains some acute thinking and some shrewd guesses, yet the work as a whole is infantine in its handling of language, and it has been doubted whether Plato was more than half serious in some of the suggestions which he puts forward. (For an account of the "Cratylus" with references to other literature see Sandys' "History of Classical Scholarship", ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... "dear people," but Aunt Mary used to impress upon me when I was small that two could not be called "people." "People" must mean a "company or crowd"; and I used to addle my infantine brain wondering how it could be that "two was a company," if two couldn't be a crowd, yet a company and a crowd were the same thing. Two must be spoken of as "persons" according to Aunt M., and I can't address you as ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... red, standing by a little table. Of this, Senor Beruete says that it is "one of the most beautiful inspirations of Velasquez, and perhaps one that reveals better than any other his power as a colourist; it is a flower, perfumed with every infantine grace." Another standing portrait, though only a half length, when she was not many years older, is that in the Salon Carre at the Louvre, which is more familiar to us being nearer home and more often reproduced. M. ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... moment she was puzzled. To her, Hugo's speech sounded insincere. But the glance of the eye that she encountered was so caressing, the curves of his mouth were so sweetly infantine, that she accused herself of harsh judgment, and remembered Hugo's foreign blood and Continental training, which had given him the habit, she supposed, of saying "pretty things." She could not doubt his sincerity when she looked at the peach-like bloom ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... alteration in the following notes; and as we could not devise any better arrangement, we have followed the order of time, and we have constantly inserted the ages of the children, for the satisfaction of preceptors and parents, to whom alone these infantine anecdotes can be interesting: We say nothing farther as to their accuracy; if the reader does not see in the anecdotes themselves internal marks of veracity, all we could say ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... child sheds its first hair, like its first teeth? I've never given much thought to infantine phenomena of any kind; still, I'm inclined to believe now that there must be such cases. Of course, we know a type of blond, nee brunette; for instance, Mrs. Senter, young Burden's fascinating aunt, whom we suspected ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... If I could pray you to revoke that decision! For it is altogether foolish and not boylike—and I shall, I confess, hate the notion of running over it—yet commented it must be; more than mere correction! I was unluckily precocious—but I had rather you saw real infantine efforts (verses at six years old, and drawings still earlier) than this ambiguous, feverish—Why not wait? When you speak of the 'Bookseller'—I smile, in glorious security—having a whole bale of sheets at the house-top. He never knew my name ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... collected their retainers, and set out for the lands of the rising sun. Here they came into contact with an Eastern civilization, ornate and dazzling, superior to their own, but still in a state of childhood, and revelling in the fanciful creations which please the infantine mind.[38] Foremost among the Christian knights went the Barons of Provence, accompanied by troops of minstrels—troubadours to sing their praises; and we might well suppose that some of the wonders of the dreaming East would now find their way into Europe, interwoven ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... with those large dark eyes swimming in happy tears. What a lovely smile! what an ingenuous, candid brow! She looks delicate, she evidently requires care, she wants the mother. And rare is the woman who would not love her the better for that! Still, what an innocent, infantine bloom in those clear, smooth cheeks! and in that slight frame, what ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... well as from the writings of well known authors of nearly all the civilized nations of Europe. In fact, every man in the early period of his life constructs a heaven for himself, as those who study the ways of children are aware, and this has given rise to a new science of infantine psychology, set forth in the writings of Taine, Darwin, Perez, ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... a tale, my mother oft breathed in my infantine ears, of a bright star that once skirted the literary horizon, and ere long darkly disappeared; of a lofty, sensitive nature, that met a staggering blow, and reeled to earth, no more to soar aloft. And, though I have never known ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... to say, his heart entirely failed him, he looked on the figures that stood near, and beheld them gazing on the infantine form with a smile so guilty and distorted, that he felt as if he were entering alive among the scenery of hell, and shuddering, he cried in an ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... with your head downward, or you'll addle them," said Mr. Brush, fiercely. This was the first time Triplet had ever answered a foe. Mrs. Woffington gave him an eloquent glance of encouragement. He nodded his head in infantine exultation ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... necessarily, exist at his birth, whatever may be the period when, or the circumstance by which, the dormant spark is first awakened into action. Parents, it is true, are in general great observers of infantine occurrences; and very apt to be presageful of wonderful results expected from trivial causes. Few parents, however, are so blessed, as to have children who possess genius: of those who are, some silently treasure up their hopes, which may be buried with ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) • James Harrison
... it. For a few moments we retired to our rooms while the pretty Hosanna arranged the forty-nine presents on the tree. Then she clapped her hands, and we rushed in. What a wondrous sight! What a shout of infantine laughter and charming prattle! for in that happy moment were we ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... child. Mary could not but wonder whether this indeed were she whose strong words had pierced and wrung her sympathies the other night, and whether a deep life-wound could lie bleeding under those brilliant eyes and that infantine exuberance of gayety; yet, surely, all that which seemed so strong, so true, so real could not be gone so soon,—and it could not be so soon consoled. Mary wondered at her, as the Anglo-Saxon constitution, with its strong, firm intensity, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... fame carried an account of the voyage to court, I know not; but it is certain that the very next morning a bruit went from thence all over the town, and (as factious reports used to run) in a very short time, viz., that his lordship rode upon the rhinoceros, than which a more infantine exploit could not have been fastened upon him. And most people were struck with amazement at it, and divers ran here and there to find out whether it was true or no. And soon after dinner some lords and others came to his lordship to know the truth from ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... its close, the tragical death of their grandfather had again dressed them in funereal weeds. They were seated together upon a couch, in front of their work-table. Grief often produces the effect of years. Hence, in a few months, Rose and Blanche had become quite young women. To the infantine grace of their charming faces, formerly so plump and rosy, but now pale and thin, had succeeded an expression of grave and touching sadness. Their large, mild eyes of limpid azure, which always had a dreamy ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... years of my infantine tyranny till, when at the age of fourteen, I became possessed with a strong desire to be sent to a public school. My father was sitting in his large arm-chair, in the porch, after tea, when I made this request, which, at ...
— Hurrah for New England! - The Virginia Boy's Vacation • Louisa C. Tuthill
... under the naked force of compulsion, or of that connected with bribes, could have any final effect in mitigating the passion of awe, connected, by our very dreams, with the shadowy and the invisible, or in tranquillizing the infantine imagination. ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... works of the world, on the bustle and sound, Seated still in his boat, he look'd leisurely round; And if now and then he his hands did employ, 'Twas with vanity, wonder, and infantine joy. ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... Saint-Nazaire, who change them only once in two weeks. These the abbe brought to the table, arranging the proper number of counters before each player, and putting the basket in the centre of the table beside the lamp, with infantine eagerness, and the manner of a man accustomed to perform ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... revelation to her, and she found herself as diverted as a child at a pantomime. In her infantine excursions to Europe she had seen only the Continent, and seen it from the nursery window; Paris, not London, was her father's Mecca, and into many of his interests there his children had naturally not entered. The images of that time moreover had grown faint and ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... voice, her pressure, her calculation. His tone, in fact, as he talked, fairly thrust these things into her face. "But you must see her for yourself. You'll judge her. You'll love her. My dear child"—he brought it all out, and if he spoke of children he might, in his candor, have been himself infantine—"my dear child, she's the person to do it for you. Make it over to her; but," he laughed, "of course see her first! Couldn't you," he wound up—for they were now near their gate, where she was to leave him—"couldn't you just simply make us meet him, at tea say, informally; just us alone, ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... been in sunny Italy, and he would have told her some other tale than that as they sat together under the pale moonlight. She had a little water-coloured drawing called Raphael and Fornarina, and she was infantine enough to tell herself that the so-called Raphael was like her Burgo—no, not her Burgo, but the Burgo that was not hers. At any rate, all the romance of the picture she might have enjoyed had they allowed her to dispose ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... virtuous groups have been pulled down from competence to penury, from the desire to prevent one from bringing shame on the parent! So that, contrary to every principle of justice, the bad is rewarded for the badness; and the good punished for the goodness. Natural affection, remembrance of infantine endearments, reluctance to abandon long-cherished hopes, compassion for the sufferings of your own flesh and blood, the dread of fatal consequences from your adhering to justice; all these beat at your heart, ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... may call it); a second and, in all manner of ways, an improved one. The young Fritz swallowed no shoe-buckles; did not leap out of window, hanging on by the hands; nor achieve anything of turbulent, or otherwise memorable, in his infantine history; the course of which was in general smooth, and runs, happily for it, below the ken of rumor. The Boy, it is said, and is easily credible, was of extraordinary vivacity; quick in apprehending ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... genial nature. It was difficult to think of her as a young lady, she was so extremely juvenile in her appearance; and her lameness, by giving her an air of childish dependence, added to the illusion caused by her fair, clustering ringlets and infantine rosiness of complexion. She wanted to bring me forward;—she coaxed, caressed, and playfully threatened, nor desisted till her mother said, ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... been adventurous in the gratification of an infantine and unreasonable curiosity; and I resolved not to be less adventurous, if need were, in the defence of every thing that can make life a blessing. I was prepared for an amicable adjustment of interests: I would undertake that Mr. Falkland should never sustain injury through my means; but ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... lurking still in spite of my misdeeds, softened the good old man's heart. He sent for his daughter, he presented me to her as her betrothed. The chamber became hallowed by a holy light as she entered. Hers was that cherub look, those large, soft eyes, full dimpled cheeks, and mouth of infantine sweetness, that expresses the rare union of happiness and love. Admiration first possessed me; she is mine! was the second proud emotion, and my lips curled with haughty triumph. I had not been the enfant gate of the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... it is to an affectionate mind, even in a way of nature, to walk through the fields, and lead a little child by the hand, enjoying its infantine prattle, and striving to improve the time by some kind word of instruction! I wish that every Christian pilgrim in the way of grace, as he walks through the Lord's pastures, would try to lead at least one little child by the hand; and perhaps, whilst he is endeavouring to guide and preserve ...
— The Annals of the Poor • Legh Richmond
... which no one else joined in. Heliodora, to whom the speech was addressed, affected to smile as in lofty tolerance of infantine pettishness. At this moment Basil stepped up to her, and kissed her hand; As though for contrast with Muscula's utterance, she greeted him in the softest tone her voice could compass, inviting him with a gesture to take a place at her side, or rather at her feet, for she was reclining ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... holding a flaming sword in his right hand, is conducting the child. This child is, in my opinion, the most wonderful of all the creations of Murillo; the form is that of an infant about five years of age, and the expression of the countenance is quite infantine, but the tread—it is the tread of a conqueror, of a God, of the Creator of the universe; and the earthly globe appears to tremble beneath ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... affection; he delighted in the majestic and the terrible. In boldness of conception and grandeur of design, he surpassed Leonardo, but never could reach the sweetness and gentleness of his figures. Even his children lose something of their infantine beauty, and look mature; his women are commanding and lofty; his men of gigantic proportions. His painting, like his sculpture, is remarkable for anatomical exactness, and perfect expression of the muscles. For this union ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... Goal of Infantine Hope, Unknown, mystic Felicity Sangrael of childish quest much sought, aethereal "Real Tea" Thy faintest tint of yellow on the milk and water pale Like Midas' stain on Pactolus, gives ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... low and retiring, his cheeks sallow, and his form curved as if with a premature old age. An unmeaning smile dilated his thin, colourless lips; and as he looked down on his strange favourites, he occasionally whispered to them a few broken expressions of endearment, almost infantine in their simplicity. His whole soul seemed to be engrossed by the labour of distributing his grain, and he followed the different movements of the poultry with an earnestness of attention which seemed almost ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, on 23 June, the first portion of the "Napoleon Museum," collected by Mrs. Sainsbury, and which had long been on exhibition. The prices fetched were ridiculously low, as the following examples will show. Among the bronzes, an infantine bust of the King of Rome, formerly in the possession of Josephine, at Malmaison, cost 20 guineas, sold for 1 pound 10s. A drawing in sepia, by Debret, of Napoleon visiting the wounded on the field, after ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... declaratory confirmation. She would preside over the innocent repasts of the young heir, with ineffable satisfaction, almost with an air of joint proprietorship with Richards in the entertainment. At the little ceremonies of the bath and toilette, she assisted with enthusiasm. The administration of infantine doses of physic awakened all the active sympathy of her character; and being on one occasion secreted in a cupboard (whither she had fled in modesty), when Mr Dombey was introduced into the nursery by his sister, to behold his ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... up the stair, he stopped short, on seeing the two lovers sitting close to each other, the one weeping, and the other trying to console her. There was such an air of infantine candour about them both, and both seemed so miserable, that the hard heart of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... second baptismal name of Mr. Browning's son; and, in his infantine mouth, it became (we do not exactly guess how), the "Penini," shortened into "Pen," which some ingenious interpreters have ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... they exhibited the same obstinacy on the mainland, they would, in all probability, have been knocked on the head, and left to die on the roadside. Perhaps the most melancholy sight was the group of little children, all infantine life and animation crushed out of them. There they silently sat, without attempting to move, till ordered by their owners to rise. Poor little creatures! long ago they had been torn from their parents, and those parents probably murdered, or, if captured, ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... so entrancingly for his auditor that the episode of a bed-room on fire passes by unnoticed. Of Maurice Sand, gifted son of an inspired mother, there is an exquisite chapter of literary criticism tempered with maternity. Other papers treat of infantine instruction as practiced by the writer herself, and readers are conscious of a thrill of envy at the thought of that little circle of Dudevantine grandchildren learning the elements of spelling and grammar ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... like the child, can be governed only by force, is merely to establish false analogies. The Indians of the Orinoco have something infantine in the expression of their joy, and the quick succession of their emotions, but they are not great children; they are as little so as the poor labourers in the east of Europe, whom the barbarism of our feudal institutions ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... account of a certain apish drollery and humor which exhibited itself in the lad, and a liking for some of the old man's pursuits, the first of the twins was the grandfather's favorite and companion, and would laugh and talk out all his infantine heart to the old gentleman, to whom the younger had seldom ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... are antidotal, got its name from scrofa, "a burrowing pig," signifying the radical destruction of important glands in the body by this undermining constitutional disease. Possibly the quaint lines which nurses have long been given to repeat for the amusement of babies while fondling their infantine fingers bear a hidden meaning which pointedly imports the scrofulous taint. This nursery distich, as we remember, personates the fingers one by one as five little fabulous pigs:—the first small piggy doesn't feel well; and the second one ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... upon tragedy. The wild sublimity of Aeschylus became the scoff of every young Phidippides. Lectures on abstruse points of philosophy, the fine distinctions of casuistry, and the dazzling fence of rhetoric, were substituted for poetry. The language lost something of that infantine sweetness which had characterised it. It became less like the ancient Tuscan, and more like ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Italian landscape and the softness of the Italian climate seem naturally fitted to dispose the poetic soul to the dreams of rural life, and the language seems, by its graceful simplicity, peculiarly adapted to express the feelings of a class of people whom we picture to ourselves as ingenuous and infantine in their natures. The manners of the Italian peasantry are more truly pastoral than those of any other people, and a bucolic poet in that fair region need not wander to Arcadia. But Sannazzaro, like all the early pastoral ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... nursery chamber, and no wonder that it was regarded with feelings of the deepest interest. Here the first dawnings of reason broke in upon my soul; the first faint gleams of intelligence awakened me from a state of infantine unconsciousness. It was here that I first drank eagerly of the fresh rills of knowledge; here my imagination, ardent and unrepressed, first plumed its wings for flight, and I stepped forth over its threshold into a world long since tried, and found as unsatisfying and ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... was my only consolation to pour out my heart to you, my brother, my only friend. You will not dispute with me? You know how wilful your poor, misery-stricken sister is. Take my girl with you; wean her from sights and thoughts of sorrow; let infantine hilarity revisit her heart, and animate her eyes; so could it never be, were she near me; it is far better for all of you that you should never see me again. For myself, I will not voluntarily seek death, that is, I will not, while I can command myself; and I can here. But drag me ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... work of another; and proof on the opposite side from the open and clamorous charge of his rivals, whose imputations can be made to bear no reasonable meaning but this by the most violent ingenuity of perversion, and who presumably were not persons of such frank imbecility, such innocent and infantine malevolence, as to forge against their most dangerous enemy the pointless and edgeless weapon of a charge which, if ungrounded, must have been easier to refute than to devise. Assuming then that in common with other young poets of his day he was thus engaged during the ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... not essential that the victim's mind be pervaded by the infantine cosmogony which parades often as religious truth. Without anything of the sort, there may arise naive interpretations, hardly even having explicit reference to supernatural agents. For example, ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... from me, and your endearments scarcely will replace! Where, Madam, lay the harm in sucking them? The dog will lick his foot, the cat her claw, his paws sustain the hibernating bear—and you decree no law to punish them! Yet, in your rage for infantine reform, you rushed this most ridiculous enactment—its earliest ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 9, 1890. • Various
... displayed unexampled energy throughout the whole of this war, was about five feet three inches in height, and was distinguished by an almost infantine character of face, and a voice low and soft as the tones of a flute. It was thought that she habituated herself to that style of speaking to conceal her really masculine nature, and to interest her audience. Her voice, notwithstanding its sweet inflections, ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... fell upon her shoulders. She dared not raise her eyes, neither did you; you held each other by the hand, closely clasped. Despite the terror that disfigured her face, I beheld my daughter in her singular and infantine beauty—accursed beauty! At sight of her Trymalcion's dead eyes lighted up and glistened like glowing coals in the middle of his wrinkled, paint-covered visage. He stood up, stretched out his emaciated arms towards my daughter as if to seize his prey, while a shocking smile disclosed his yellow ...
— The Brass Bell - or, The Chariot of Death • Eugene Sue
... Palmer, Duchess of Cleveland, was there, no longer young, but still retaining some traces of that superb and voluptuous loveliness which twenty years before overcame the hearts of all men. There too was the Duchess of Portsmouth, whose soft and infantine features were lighted up with the vivacity of France. Hortensia Mancini, Duchess of Mazarin, and niece of the great Cardinal, completed the group. She had been early removed from her native Italy to the court where her uncle was supreme. His power and her own attractions had drawn ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... rancho and the restoration of the Mission Chapel, and together they had commended Clarence from the level of their superior passionless reserve and years. Clarence felt hopelessly young and hopelessly lonely; the naive prattle of the young girls beside him appeared infantine. In his abstraction, he heard Mrs. Peyton allude to the beauty of the night, and propose that after coffee and chocolate the ladies should put on their wraps and go with her to the old garden. Clarence raised his eyes; ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... to relate more of my infantine adventures, it will be necessary to introduce a kinsman of mine to the reader's acquaintance; of whom, though the alliance were now of some standing, ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... Sunday, Mr Scott and Sir Wm. Forbes of Pitsligo breakfasted with them, and the host's heart was delighted by the 'little infantine noise' which his child Veronica made, with the appearance of listening to the great man. The fond father with a cheerful recklessness, not realized we fear, declared she should have for this five hundred ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... surprise when she saw Mrs. Gaunt glide into the room with her little boy asleep in her arms, and an expression upon her face more sublime than anything Mercy Vint had ever yet seen on earth. She kissed the babe softly, and, becoming infantine as well as angelic by this contact, sat herself down in a moment on the floor with him, and held out her hand to Mercy. "There," said she, "come, sit beside us, and see how I hate him,—no more ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... but every thing in the Bible, and the early traditions of famous peoples, warrants us to believe, that the first ages of men before the Flood, were spiritually enlightened from one great common source of extraordinary aboriginal revelation; so that the earliest ages of the world were not the most infantine and ignorant to a comprehensive survey, as modern conceit so fondly imagines, but the most gigantic and the most enlightened. That beautiful but material and debasing heathenism, with which our Greek and Latin education has made us so familiar, is only a defaced ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... philandering together through gardens of amaranth and asphodel towards the Grecian portico of heaven; and all these fortunate personages, whether monarchs, priests, fine ladies, or beggars, are depicted with perfectly infantine faces. To do this well lay exactly in the quaint, delicate nature of the angelic Frater; and this portion of the picture is most exquisitely handled. The other moiety, where devils with rabbits' ears, tiger faces, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... any man be to me as Clerval was, or any woman another Elizabeth? Even where the affections are not strongly moved by any superior excellence, the companions of our childhood always possess a certain power over our minds which hardly any later friend can obtain. They know our infantine dispositions, which, however they may be afterwards modified, are never eradicated; and they can judge of our actions with more certain conclusions as to the integrity of our motives. A sister or a brother can never, unless indeed such symptoms ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... refutation—that he was not, and that, in consequence, the whole scheme of sacerdotal religion as prevalent in the Roman and Oriental Christian Churches, and to a moderate extent in the Anglican Church, is entirely baseless, grounded, not on the institution of Jesus their reputed founder, but on an infantine superstition which the third century of Christianity took over from the Jewish and Pagan traditions which had preceded it. Hence the whole protracted controversy, which has set no end of theological ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... books and antiquities were arranged in scrupulous order. Here and there, on separate stands in front of the shelves, were placed a beautiful feminine torso; a headless statue, with an uplifted muscular arm wielding a bladeless sword; rounded, dimpled, infantine limbs severed from the trunk, inviting the lips to kiss the cold marble; some well-preserved Roman busts; and two or three vases from Magna Grecia. A large table in the centre was covered with antique bronze lamps and small vessels in dark ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... more minutely the proceedings of the child, and great was his astonishment, when on the girl as usual repairing to the spot, and making a noise something similar to the chirping of a bird, a snake appeared out of a hole in the wall, and fearlessly partook of the repast provided for it by its infantine attendant. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 576 - Vol. 20 No. 576., Saturday, November 17, 1832 • Various
... antagonist. As we got up we saw the shaggy tails of our dogs wagging vehemently outside a cavern, within which it did not seem possible that any large animal could be hidden. Now Boxer would rush further in, now Toby, while a whimpering sound, mingled with an occasional infantine growl, showed us that the cave was alone occupied by the cubs of which we were in search. Fearing that the animals would be injured, we called off the dogs, when their bloody mouths and the brown ...
— With Axe and Rifle • W.H.G. Kingston
... as well as possible. She is scolding the fire, because it has burnt her dear little toes. Look, she is showing them to me. Naughty fire, to burn my baby." And thereupon followed one of those maternal and infantine duets, which appear such hopeless jargon to the ...
— Doctor Luttrell's First Patient • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... at the moment that his wife had certainly more than an infantine will of her own. "You don't know her," ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... Vaughan found his secretary with the usual heaps of letters. One envelope, addressed in a large and rather infantine hand, was put aside for him. ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... velvet, and the colour on her neck deepened and whitened with every breath. She seemed smaller and more slender than when he had seen her in the street, and there was now something in the curve of her cheek almost infantine. When at last he turned and caught his own reflection in the mirror behind him, a shock passed through him as though he had seen a shameful thing, and his clouded mind and his clouded thoughts grew clearer. For a moment their eyes met then his ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... that the scholar critic comprehends fully the lessons taught; but to pretend to go before the masters, and to set up a post with his Number 20 marked upon it, and to bid his master reach it if he can, is the puerile play of an infantine intellect, or very conceited mind! And so we give M. De Piles, and all his followers, a slap in the face, and bid them go packing with Number 20. We will not condescend to pull to pieces this fantastic scheme, which is in its distinctions, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... that he saw was of a delicate little fairy form; a complexion of pearly white, with a cheek of the hue of a pink shell; a fair, sweet, infantine face surrounded by a fleecy radiance of soft golden hair. The vision appeared to float in some white gauzy robes; and, when she spoke or smiled, what an innocent, fresh, untouched, unspoiled look there was upon the face! John gazed, and thought ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Fordham, over his sketches, submitted to hear a good deal. He told his mother that the story was the most diverting thing he had ever heard, with its queer mixture of childish simplicity and borrowed romance, of natural poetry and of infantine absurdity, of extraordinary knowledge and equally comical ignorance, of originality and imitation, so that his great difficulty had been not to laugh in the wrong place, when Babie had tears in her eyes at the heights of pathos and sublimity, and Sydney was shedding ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... she insisted on having the peacock removed, and put into her chamber. All the ladies of the court, who had not seen Rosetta, then came to pay their respects to her, and brought her a variety of presents, which she received with such infantine grace and pretty gratitude, as to delight everybody. The king and his brother were thinking, meanwhile, how they should contrive to find the king of the peacocks. At length they had Rosetta's picture ...
— Bo-Peep Story Books • Anonymous
... besides, are generally brighter—they shelter a more liquid light than the blue or grey. Southern eyes have generally most beautiful whites. And as to the charm of the childish figure, there is usually an infantine slenderness in the little Southener that is at least as young and sweet as the round form of the blond child. And yet the painters of Italy would have none of it. They rejected the dusky brilliant pale little Italians ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... cradle that it cannot even move a hand. These cradles have hood-shaped tops, and over the whole thick coverings are placed, so that the wonder is the child does not smother. The cradle is usually deposited in some safe corner, and the baby is left to sleep or amuse itself with its infantine thoughts. The cradle is sometimes attached to two ropes to form a swing, and when the mother becomes conscious of the child's awakening she uncovers its head at times and the tiny thing casts its eyes around. ...
— The Religious Life of the Zuni Child - Bureau of American Ethnology • (Mrs.) Tilly E. (Matilda Coxe Evans) Stevenson
... God knows how infantine the memory may have been, that was awakened within me by the sound of my mother's voice in the old parlour, when I set foot in the hall. She was singing in a low tone. I think I must have lain in her arms, and heard her singing so to me when ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... indulgencia indulgence. indulto pardon. inerme unarmed, disarmed. inescrutable inscrutable. inextinguible inextinguishable. infalibilidad f. infallibility. infame infamous. infanteria infantry. infantil infantine, childish. infeliz unhappy. infierno hell. infinito infinite. inflamar to inflame. informe m. information. infortunado unfortunate. infortunio misfortune. infundir to infuse, inspire. ingles, -a English. ingratitud f. ingratitude. inhumanidad ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... Gershom sit about the living-room table and drink of the founts of wisdom. But we have a teacher here who loves to teach. And he is infinitely patient and kind with my little toddlers. Dinkie already asks him questions without number, while Poppsy gratefully but decorously vamps him with her infantine gazes. Then Gershom—Heaven bless his scholastic old high-browed solemnity—has just assured me that Dinkie betrays many evidences ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... her daughter, calling her girl in derision The Lady Anna,—when Lady Anna had been more poorly clad and blessed with less of the comforts of home than any of them. Years would roll by, and they should live to know that the Lady Anna,—the sport of their infantine cruelty,—was Lady Anna indeed. And as the girl became a woman the dream was becoming a reality. The rank, the title, the general acknowledgment and the wealth would all be there. Then came the first great decisive triumph. Overtures of love and friendship were made ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope
... briefly mention the minor sculptors of this group would be impossible. Mino di Giovanni, called Da Fiesole, was characterised by grace that tended to degenerate into formality. The tombs in the Abbey of Florence have an almost infantine sweetness of style, which might be extremely piquant, were it not that Mino pushed this quality in other works to the verge of mannerism.[104] Their architectural features are the same as those of similar monuments in Tuscany:—a shallow recess, flanked by Renaissance pilasters, ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... Mat, as he was familiarly called by his numerous acquaintances, was a short, florid, rosy little gentleman of some four or five-and-forty, with a well-curled wig of the fairest imaginable auburn, the gentle wave of the front locks, which played in infantine loveliness upon his little bullet forehead, contrasting strongly enough with a cunning leer of his eye, and a certain nisi prius laugh that however it might please a client, rarely brought pleasurable feelings to his opponent in ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... immediate answer. Lady Aylmer, triumphantly feeling that she had the culprit on the hip, did not care to notice this. She was doing the best she could for his happiness as she had done for his health, when in days gone by she had administered to him his infantine rhubarb and early senna; but as she had never then expected him to like her doses, neither did she now expect that he should be well pleased at the remedial measures to which ...
— The Belton Estate • Anthony Trollope
... comment rather saturates these units of narrative than surrounds or interjoins them, and this is the case with what follows. The infantine peculiarities of Gargantua; his dress and the mystery of its blue and white colours (the blue of heaven and the white of the joy of earth); how his governesses and he played together; what smart answers he made; how he became early ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... an article of belief with La Cibot (and be it noted that this faith in simplicity is the great source and secret of the success of all infantine strategy); La Cibot, therefore, could not suspect Schmucke of deceit when he came to say to her, with a face half of ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... his countrymen. Mr. Johnson was pleased with my daughter Veronica[56], then a child of about four months old. She had the appearance of listening to him. His motions seemed to her to be intended for her amusement; and when he stopped, she fluttered, and made a little infantine noise, and a kind of signal for him to begin again. She would be held close to him; which was a proof, from simple nature, that his figure was not horrid. Her fondness for him endeared her still more ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... handed down by old women) looked out from under a gray conical hat, trimmed with white ostrich-feathers, and her little toes peeped from a buff petticoat worn under a puce gown. Her features were not regular: they were almost infantine, as you may see from miniatures in possession of the family, her mouth showing much sensitiveness, and one could be sure that her faults would not lie on the side of bad temper unless ...
— A Group of Noble Dames • Thomas Hardy
... not want society. To small infantine gayeties they were unaccustomed. They were all in all to each other. I do not suppose that there ever was a family more tenderly bound to each other. Maria read the newspapers, and reported intelligence to her younger sisters which it is wonderful they could take an interest ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... short for expiation. There was another object, for which he also thought life too short, and that was to secure the happiness of Alice—whom he loved with a purity and intensity that was deepened by her helplessness and almost infantine artlessness. He knew that her blindness was hopeless, but it seemed to him that he loved her the more for her blindness, her entire dependence on his care. It would be such a holy task to protect and cherish her, and ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... and the activity of her well-proportioned, and even almost voluptuous figure, inspired the idea of strength of mind, rather than of body. There was a simplicity sometimes indeed in her manner, which bordered on infantine ingenuousness, that led people of common discernment to underrate her talents, and smile at the flights of her imagination. But those who could not comprehend the delicacy of her sentiments, were attached by her unfailing sympathy, ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... will these general truths appear, when we remember that they hold throughout adult life as well as throughout infantine life. It is by an experimentally-gained knowledge of the natural consequences, that men and women are checked when they go wrong. After home-education has ceased, and when there are no longer parents and teachers to forbid this ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... science of electricity was in its infancy; the laws of force were misunderstood; men did not know what heat really was. They knew next to nothing of the history of the globe, and they accounted for the existence of varying species of plants and animals by means of the most infantine hypotheses. A complete revolution—vital and all-embracing—has altered our modes of thought, so that the man of 1887 can scarcely bring himself to conceive the state of mind which contented the man ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... witnessed that burst of enthusiasm in his young child's mind, and saw in it a foreshadowing of his future eminence. He pressed a penny into his hand, and gave vent to his feelings (as did his exemplary wife also), in a shout of approving laughter. The infantine appeal to their common sympathies, at once restored cheerfulness to the conversation, and ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... rewarder of them who diligently seek Him; and there is a moment in human progress when the anticipated rewards and punishments must be of a Mahometan character—the happiness of the senses. It was thus that the Jews were disciplined; out of a coarse, rude, infantine state, they were educated by rewards and punishments to abstain from present sinful gratification: at first, the promise of the life which now is, afterwards the promise of that which is to come; but even then the rewards and punishments of a future state were spoken of, ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... her, not by her beauty, though that was marked, but by her cordial, unaffected manner of placing her two hands in ours, and by her infantine sweetness of expression. Whatever she might have gone through, I saw she had not suffered. There was no line or track of experience, on her broad, tranquil brow, nor was there the hushed, restrained expression left in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... hotter. Lodge and Julian Horne went off for a swim in the cool end of the lake. Peter still slept, looking so innocent and infantine in his sleep that no one had the heart to wake him. French and Helena were left together, and were soon driven by the advancing sun to the deep shade of a lime-avenue, which, starting from the back of the house, ran for half a mile through the park. Here they were absolutely alone. Lady ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... that an invitation to court should have caused a fluttering in the bosom of an inexperienced young woman. But it was the duty of the parent to watch over the child, and to show her that on one side were only infantine vanities and chimerical hopes, on the other liberty, peace of mind, affluence, social enjoyments, honorable distinctions. Strange to say, the only hesitation was on the part of Frances. Dr. Burney was transported out of himself with delight. Not such are the raptures ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay |
