"Decrepitude" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of Chioggia in the days of powder, sword-knot, and soprani. Baffo walks beside us in hypocritical composure of bag-wig and senatorial dignity, whispering unmentionable sonnets in his dialect of Xe and Ga. Somehow or another that last dotage of S. Mark's decrepitude is more recoverable by our fancy than the heroism of Pisani ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... votes his majesty concurred, although during the noble earl's life he had opposed an application made to him to settle the pension he enjoyed in reversion to his second son, William Pitt, until, at least, decrepitude or death had put an end to him "as a trumpet of sedition." His majesty, however, could not carry his resentment beyond the grave, and perhaps pleased with the last noble sounds of his trumpet, he gave his warm assent to the honours and rewards which parliament had voted to ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... stars and solar system had at some time in the past a beginning, is as much a matter of certainty as that they will at some future time cease to be. Stars, like organic beings, have their birth, grow and arrive at maturity, then decline into a state of decrepitude, and finally die out. The duration of the life of a star, which may be reckoned by millions of years, depends upon the length of time during which it can maintain a temperature that renders it capable of emitting light. By the constant ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... obtained their freedom, and then, glowing with gratitude, in despite of age, decrepitude, and loss of strength, they started directly for the estate of their benefactor, and there, in the terrible heat, they laboured for weeks in building him a road which they knew he had long desired. Love conquered weakness, and they did not cease their toil until their handiwork, which they called ...
— The Little Colonel's House Party • Annie Fellows Johnston
... not the order of civilization in all parts of the world been the same? Does not the growth of society resemble individual growth? Do not both exhibit to us phases of youth, of maturity, of decrepitude? To a person who has carefully considered the progressive civilization of groups of men in regions of the earth far apart, who has observed the identical forms under which that advancing civilization has manifested itself, is it not clear that the procedure is determined by ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... to his handkerchief and tied knots in it till it gave way under the strain. William's handkerchiefs, being regularly used to perform the functions of blotting paper among other duties not generally entrusted to handkerchiefs, were always in the last stages of decrepitude. ...
— More William • Richmal Crompton
... the ecstasies that thrilled the soul of Grattan as he gave utterance to the spirit of expiring freedom in those orations that rank among the world's masterpieces? The snows of age melted and the decrepitude of years was flung aside, and his eyes gleamed with strange fires as he beheld sodden corruption struck dumb and hang its guilty head; when he saw the wavering drink fresh courage with each new outburst, and men of commonest clay transformed into heroes by the blaze of his genius. ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... inconstancy of man in his [various] ages: green in his childhood; fiery in the age of his virility; white in old age; and bald in his decrepitude." But his greatest change is in his customs, for he is a continual Proteus, and an inconstant Vertumnus. [94] Thus ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... of nations from youth to decrepitude, and, coming back at last to himself and to his own laud and time, breaks forth into a lament of grave ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... truths do the majority rally round? Truths so stricken in years that they are sinking into decrepitude. When a truth is so old as that, gentlemen, it's in a fair way to become a lie (Laughter ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... what would you say about the body, my friend? Are you not surprised at any one of his own accord bringing upon himself deformity, leanness, ugliness, decrepitude? ...
— Laws • Plato
... conscious of possessing. He would mention the ten years of his life, from twenty-five to thirty-five years of age, as a period very deficient in self-contentedness. The fact is, with a poetic temperament, he had been born in an age when the poetic faith of which he was a votary had fallen into decrepitude, and had become only a form with the public, not yet gifted with sufficient fervour to discover a new creed. He was a pupil of Pope and Boileau, yet both from his native impulse and from the glowing influence of Rousseau, he felt the necessity and desire of infusing into the verse of the ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... Finally, thus endeavoring, I fell sick. Ye brought me here, and I supposed the end, And went to sleep with one thought that, at least, {185} Though the whole earth should lie in wickedness, We had the truth, might leave the rest to God. Yet now I wake in such decrepitude As I had slidden down and fallen afar, Past even the presence of my former self, {190} Grasping the while for stay at facts which snap, Till I am found away from my own world, Feeling for foot-hold through a blank profound, Along with unborn people in strange lands, Who say—I ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... evening out of the hospital courtyard into the corridor which led to my little workroom, I was conscious of two new arrivals. There were several men round the stove, but these two were sitting apart on a bench close to my door. We used to get men in all stages of decrepitude, but I had never seen two who looked so completely under the weather. They were the extremes—in age, in colouring, in figure, in everything; and they sat there, not speaking, with every appearance of apathy ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... but the silence and mystery of its government concealed even from the Venetians the decrepitude of the state. The government was an aristocratic sovereignty, founded on the corruption of the people and treachery, for the master sinew of the government was espionage; its prestige, mystery; its ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... observe the power of all the passions in all their combinations, and trace the changes of the human mind, as they are modified by various institutions, and accidental influences of climate or custom, from the sprightliness of infancy to the despondence of decrepitude. He must divest himself of the prejudices of his age or country; he must consider right and wrong in their abstracted and invariable state; he must disregard present laws and opinions, and rise to general and transcendental truths, which will always be the same; he must, ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... truly valuable things are dependent on our complete success; for thence would come the regeneration of a people,—the removal of a foul scurf that has overgrown their life, and keeps them in a state of disease and decrepitude, one of the chief symptoms of which is, that, the more they suffer and are debased, the more they imagine themselves strong and beautiful. No human effort, on a grand scale, has ever yet resulted according to the purpose of its projectors. The advantages are always ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... afloat upon th' Eternal Main! } Fear not; but still indulge thy wanton hours, And strew thy wint'ry path with vernal flowers. How long thine hours may last, I cannot say; FOLLY ne'er sees beyond the present day. And should Old Time, with subtle art, delude Thy feebled Age into decrepitude; Still on thy crutches sing, and dance, and play, And gild the close of Life's short Holiday! No second Childhood can my S—— wear; The first yet boasts an incomplete career. Amid the duties ...
— The First of April - Or, The Triumphs of Folly: A Poem Dedicated to a Celebrated - Duchess. By the author of The Diaboliad. • William Combe
... cracked and yellow; the originally coarse and ugly wall-paper now blotched with age; the carpet thin, threadbare, patched and stained; the furniture of various woods and colors, and in various stages of decrepitude. ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... destroying completely the ancient, long-warmed nest of legalized prostitution, which nest it had itself created—scattering its remains over the hospitals, jails and streets of the big city. Even to this day a few of the former proprietresses who have remained alive and have reached the limit of decrepitude, and quondam housekeepers, fat and hoarse, like pug-dogs grown old, recall this common destruction with sorrow, horror, ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... before, had arrived at the trying age of three-score and ten, which, for the majority of men, is the age of decrepitude, that sinister forerunner of death; but time had neither bowed his head nor enfeebled his intellect. The clearness of his mind and the vigor of his limbs indicated that he was likely to be one of those centenarians who carry their years so lightly that they make ...
— Which? - or, Between Two Women • Ernest Daudet
... period of Philippine history has been called its Golden Age. Certainly no succeeding generation saw such changes and advancement. It was the age of Spain's greatest power and the slow decline and subsequent decrepitude that soon afflicted the parent state could not fail to react upon the colony. This decline was in no small degree the consequence of the tremendous strain to which the country was subjected in the effort ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 • Emma Helen Blair
... never a qualm to all manner of dust—cursed all Chinamen on land or sea with an especial and piquant blight invoked upon the one now in hiding, then took from the back of a chair where she had hung it the moment before a riding skirt come to feebleness and decrepitude. She held it up before critical eyes as one scanning the morning paper for ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... ordinary way. Burr lived then in Jersey City. His office (23 Nassau street) swarmed with applicants for aid, and he seemed now to have quite lost the power of refusing. In no other respects, bodily or mental, did he exhibit signs of decrepitude. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... careless hand of a master who is satisfied if they but sign his decrees, with the i's properly dotted, and the t's unexceptionably crossed. They are the crumply officials who melted into defencelessness and moral decrepitude after Frederick the Great, and again at the glance of Napoleon, and who owe the little stiffness they have to the fact that Bismarck lived. It is one of the things a full-blooded man is least able to bear in Germany, to hear the querulous questioning of the great deeds of this ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... submitted to this course of treatment, in the fall of 1882, made a handsome growth in 1883, and have set fruit buds for a good crop in 1884. The life of an average apple tree in Illinois is scarcely more than 35 or 40 years; but there is no doubt if, when they begin to show signs of decrepitude or decay, they are treated as above, they may be made to live and bear fruit for perhaps a ...
— The Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56, No. 2, January 12, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... beholds a nation, perpetuating the language of the brave and free; when the parent stock has perhaps ceased to be an empire; or is lingering on, like modern Greece, in the hopeless languor of decay and decrepitude. ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... I, when fallacious hopes were rais'd Of his dear safety—whom, howe'er belov'd— However strong in health, and firmly built Like a fine statue of the antique world, As if he might have reach'd a century Without decrepitude, we ne'er again— Nor we alone, no other human eye— Can e'er behold! Then had I painted him Returning, as he lately left our shores, With all the fairness and the bloom of youth— The light brown hair, and its soft yellow gleams, Brightened with silver; thickening into shade, Now with ...
— Vignettes in Verse • Matilda Betham
... monthly that his health unfitted him for the performance of duty. The signature of his last report (not written by himself), of November 30 (herewith[5]), would seem to indicate great physical derangement or decrepitude, approaching, perhaps, ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Polk - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 4: James Knox Polk • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... extreme in praising them, or from recommending them by quotation,—and though, as has been said, the tone and taste of the life which they describe must jar on the feelings of those who are unwilling to see the decrepitude of elderly civilization coming down upon a new country, ere its maturity has been reached—or even ere its youth has ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... family—a chaplain, a captain, and a young lawyer. His lordship was scarcely past the meridian of life; yet, in spite of his gay and debonair manner, he looked old, as if he were paying for the libertinism of his youth by premature decrepitude. His countenance announced pretensions to ability; his easy and affable address, and the facility with which he expressed himself, gained him credit at first for much more understanding than he really possessed. There was a plausibility in all he said; but, if ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... longer dead are ripe; and the oranges of those who died long ago are dry and wizened. There is no night in that blessed land, and no sleep; for the eyes of the spirits are never weighed down with slumber. Sorrow and sickness, decrepitude and death never enter; even boredom is unknown. But it is only the nights, or rather the hours corresponding to nights on earth, which the spirits pass in these realms of bliss. At daybreak they revisit their old home on earth and take up their posts in the cemeteries ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... "A happy land in the remote north where the inhabitants enjoy a natural pefection attended with complete happiness obtained without exertion. There is there no vicissitude, nor decrepitude, nor death, nor fear: no distinction of virtue and vice, none of the inequalities denoted by the words best, worst, and intermediate, nor any change resulting from the succession of the four Yugas." See MUIR'S Sanskrit Texts, Vol. ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... into an angry inward argument against his suggestion of the savings bank. It was an argument he had often rehearsed, often declaimed, and at bottom it all came to this—without that box under his bed, his life would have sunk to dulness and decrepitude; he would have been merely a pitiful and lonely old man. He had neither wife nor children, all for the hoard's sake; but while the hoard was there, to be handled any hour, he regretted nothing. Besides, there was the peasant's ...
— Bessie Costrell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... crewel shawl,—sometimes worn by superannuated women of a former generation; a garment of hideousness. Once, when a little girl, she had loyally jerked it off her grandmother because it added to her ugliness and decrepitude. ...
— Bride of the Mistletoe • James Lane Allen
... upon a rock, with my bristling head swung high, breathing through wide nostrils all the savour of the world. For I had come marvellously from decrepitude to strength. I had writhed from the bonds of age and was young again. I smelled the turf and knew for the first time how sweet that smelled. And like lightning my moving nose sniffed all things to my heart and separated them ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • James Stephens
... rule other people. That it cannot make its government govern or its education educate we may take as a trifling weakness of oligarchy; but pleasure we do look to see in such a class; and it has surely come to its decrepitude when it cannot make its ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... of Youth and Decrepitude of Nations. Statesmen Prophets. General Claim for All Genius. Instances of Secular Prediction: Cayotte's of the French Revolution. The Oracles of Apollo. Vettius Valens' Twelve Vultures. Spencer's of the Disruption of the American Union. Saint Malachi's Prophecies. Mohammed's Prophecies. ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... particularly, is of importance as showing how carefully Fuller studied into the secret of expression, and of nature's sympathy with human moods. This poor, worn, sad, old face, in which beauty and hope shone once, and where resignation and memory now dwell; this trembling figure, to whose decrepitude the bending staff confesses as she totters down the hill; the gathering gloom of the sky, in which one ray of promise for a bright to-morrow shines from the setting sun; the mute witnessing of the trees upon the ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume I. No. VI. June, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... he may have been, showed no signs either of stiffness or decrepitude. On the contrary he exhibited all the agility of a tiger-cat; along with a fierce determination to continue the combat he had initiated,—notwithstanding the odds that were against him. On discharging his gun, he ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid
... probable duration of the "spell o' weather," and John's or Pat's chance of getting or losing a job in consequence. The snow man stood there till long after all doubts were settled on these mooted points, falling slowly into helpless decrepitude in spite of occasional patching. But long before that time the frost succeeding the snow had paved the way for coasting in the hilly streets, and discovered countless "slides" in those that were flat, to the huge delight of the small boy and the discomfiture of his unsuspecting elders. With ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... henceforth dwell on the blessed hours when, not long since, I saw that benignant face, the clear eyes, the silently smiling mouth, the form yet upright in its great age—to the very last, with so much spring and cheeriness, and such an absence of decrepitude, that even the term ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... seen the green of the valley turn to gold and then to flaming brown. I had seen the fire perish out of those autumnal tints, and with the falling of the leaves, a slow, grey, bald decrepitude covering the world. And to this had now succeeded chill wintry gales that howled and whistled through the logs of my wretched hut, whilst the western wind coming down over the frozen zone above cut into me like a ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... ridicule, while Burke was pouring forth, night after night, speech after speech, rich in the most sparkling and most solid opulence of the mind. He must have been more or less than man, to have never cast a glance at the decrepitude of the formal coxcomb whom he once acknowledged as his leader, and compared his shrunk shape with the vigorous and athletic proportions of his own intellectual stature. Hamilton, too, must have had many a pang. The wretched nervousness of character which at ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... advice on painting. The response was another decided negative. Stillman felt that he was foolishly wasting his time and declared the seance at an end. But the girl sat silent. Then after a moment she slowly arose with the air of decrepitude, took a lithograph from the wall and went through the pantomime of stretching a sheet of paper on a drawing board, sharpening a pencil, tracing the outline, the washing-in of a drawing, etc., and then proceeded ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... with her beasts. Disgusted with her treachery and cruelty, he tries to escape from her, but is taken and brought back, when with reproaches she banishes him, sentencing him to pass a thousand years in decrepitude and pain. He returns to the sea, and there finds the body of Scylla, whom the goddess has not transformed but drowned. Glaucus learns that his destiny is that, if he passes his thousand years in collecting all the bodies of drowned lovers, a youth beloved of the gods will appear and help him. ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... 1: Circumcision by the removal of the piece of skin in the member of generation, signified "the passing away of the old generation" [*Athanasius, De Sabb. et Circumcis.]: from the decrepitude of which we are freed by Christ's Passion. Consequently this figure was not completely fulfilled in Christ's birth, but in His Passion, until which time the circumcision retained its virtue and status. Therefore it behooved Christ to be circumcised as a son ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... bereft. Old age springs on him suddenly, as Javert had done in other days. He has, apparently without provocation, passed from strength to decrepitude. Since he sees Cossette no more, he has grown gray, stooped, decrepit. There is no morning now, since he does not see Cossette. You have seen him walking to the corner to catch sight of her house. How feeble he is! Another day, ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... doctrines of the Socialists, he for one should throw in his lot with the people, until the Government atoned for their atrocity by showing that they were prepared to listen to the demands of men who knew what they wanted, and whom the decrepitude of society forced into pushing their demands in ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... destroyed, it is safe to say that the foundations of physical science would remain unshaken, and that the vast intellectual progress of the last two centuries would be largely, though incompletely, recorded. Nor have any signs of halting or of decrepitude manifested themselves in our own times. As in Dr. Wallis's days, so in these, "our business is, precluding theology and state affairs, to discourse and consider of philosophical enquiries." But our "Mathematick" is one which Newton would have ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... who are leaders in the exclusion of the women. In control of the initiation of the youths, they separate them from their mothers or sisters and often decree for the initiates a ceremonial avoidance of all women for a set time. The penalties they threaten—sickness, decrepitude, effeminacy—are too dire to pass unheeded. This "avoidance" has been explained as due to the monopolistic spirit of the elders. With their women they want no interference by the youths. But a far more plausible explanation, I think, ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... Ricordi Politici e Civili, No. clxxxix., for a lament of this kind over the decrepitude of kingdoms, almost sublime ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... in your hand, my dear fellow," said he (for in those days youths did not call each other "old man"—with sad sense of their own decrepitude). "Bob, you are losing your freedom of touch. You must come out of these stony holes, and look ...
— George Bowring - A Tale Of Cader Idris - From "Slain By The Doones" By R. D. Blackmore • R. D. Blackmore
... care of and support her faithful James,- faithful, not only to her as a husband, but proverbially faithful as a slave to those who would not willingly sacrifice a dollar for his comfort, now that he had commenced his descent into the dark vale of decrepitude and suffering. This important decision was received as joyful news indeed to our ancient couple, who were the objects of it, and who were trying to prepare their hearts for a severe struggle, and one altogether new to them, as they had never before been ...
— The Narrative of Sojourner Truth • Sojourner Truth
... boldly against the sky, with its elbows at all angles and its scaly bark holding the snow. Against evergreens it shows its ruggedness specially well. It presents forms to attract the artist. Even when gnarly and broken, it does not convey an impression of decrepitude and decay but rather of a hardy old character bearing his burdens. In every winter landscape I ...
— The Apple-Tree - The Open Country Books—No. 1 • L. H. Bailey
... picturesque cardinal's hats, with cord and tassels, have long been pendant from the vault of the choir, and are now dimmed in colour and thick deep with dust, seemingly destined to fall of sheer old age and decrepitude. Further particulars concerning this picturesque detail are wanting only from the lack of any one in attendance from whom one might get this information,—perhaps some reader of these ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... he himself supplies as that which the author has deposited therein. Each word is a key which unlocks a store of imprisoned emotions. The very word Italy has a magic which imparts to it a charm even in the geography. And Bergsoee, though he works, without suspicion of its decrepitude, the ancient machinery of Italian romance, is unaffectedly eloquent and unsophistically entertaining. The historic whisperings which he catches from the names, the ruins, the facial types, and the very trees and grass of Genazzano invest his letters from that picturesque neighborhood ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... to obtain from him some confirmation of his own view, that the objectionable scene should be entirely remodelled or, better still, cut out altogether. The reverend dignitary was supposed to be extremely short-sighted and wandering, moreover, in his mind, from sheer decrepitude. Perhaps he was wily beyond the common measure of man. Be that as it may, he witnessed the spectacle but allowed nothing to escape his lips safe a succession ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... suicide on the part of the Confederation was met by a new chicane. Though every member, whose character and talents could for a moment redeem the deformity, dulness and decrepitude of the Repeal Association, had passed from its ranks and enrolled themselves in the new League, it resolved to struggle on, acting as a check and a stain by its anility and crookedness, on the rising hopes of the country. During the discussions that led to the formation of the league, ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... any other Man to write such a one. I think I must write to T. C. to felicitate him on this truly 'Green Old Age.' Oh, it was good too to read it here, with the old Sea (which also has not sunk into Decrepitude) rolling in from that North: and as I looked up from the Book, there was a Norwegian Barque beating Southward, close to the Shore, and nearly all Sail set. Read—Read! you will, you must, be pleased; and write to ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... progress. There is the progress that moves away from infancy towards youth, towards maturity, towards age and decrepitude. And there is a higher progress, a progress that moves towards infancy. 'Except ye be converted and become as little children,' Jesus said, 'ye shall not enter into the kingdom of God.' And the only way of becoming a little ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... Naturally of a delicate frame, excesses have much enfeebled his constitution; his continual ill-health, his pallor, and his teeth already decayed, announce, that though so young in years, he is expiating the pleasures of a Sultan by a premature decrepitude. Abdul Medjid has several children, who are weak and sickly like their father, and the state of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... — N. age; oldness[obs3] &c. adj.; old age, advanced age, golden years; senility, senescence; years, anility[obs3], gray hairs, climacteric, grand climacteric, declining years, decrepitude, hoary age, caducity[obs3], superannuation; second childhood, second childishness; dotage; vale of years, decline of life, "sear and yellow leaf" [Macbeth]; threescore years and ten; green old age, ripe age; longevity; time of ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... task of carefully watching the Left, such was this precaution. The Left at first had confined itself to irony, and borrowing from me a word to which people then attached, though wrongly, the idea of decrepitude, had called the sixteen Commissioners the "Burgraves." The irony subsequently turning into suspicion, the Left had on its side ended by creating a committee of sixteen members to direct the Left, and observe the Right; these the ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... stranger, staff in hand, was pursuing his solitary walk along the centre of the street. As he drew near the advancing soldiers, and as the roll of their drum came full upon his ear, the old man raised himself to a loftier mien, while the decrepitude of age seemed to fall from his shoulders, leaving him in gray but unbroken dignity. Now he marched onward with a warrior's step, keeping time to the military music. Thus the aged form advanced on one side ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... death. For long or short is not in things that are no more. Aristotle saith, there are certaine little beasts alongst the river Hyspanis, that live but one day; she which dies at 8 o'clocke in the morning, dies in her youth, and she that dies at 5 in the afternoon, dies in her decrepitude, who of us doth not laugh, when we shall see this short moment of continuance to be had in consideration of good or ill fortune? The most and the least is ours, if we compare it with eternitie, or equall it to the lasting ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... snails. But the sum of them rose by leaps and bounds to an appalling total. Alice found two grey hairs in her red-gold locks. Will had to use glasses for reading fine print at night. From their point of view, decrepitude, senility, dotage stared them in the face, while the bright voyage of life which they were resolved to make only together, was threatened with shipwreck among the shoals ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke
... death, whatever might await him after—conscious of a useful and blameless life. He died as he had desired to die, standing alone with me under the moonlit sky, unconfined, escaping from the decrepitude of old age, still in the full possession and maturity of his talents, and in the ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... eyes which he often took off and put on again; when he did so his eyes changed, looking helpless and malicious without the glasses, like those of little owlets in daylight; his thin, shaven lips were closely compressed, and there was often an expression of mistrust and decrepitude in his face; his ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... seemed to have become crystallized, as it were, in age and decrepitude, and advanced no further in either—was pottering around the garden, eying askant, like an old robin, the new plough furrows. Pauper women humped their calico backs over the green slopes of the fields, searching for dandelion ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... of family look; and this resemblance, so often observed by travellers, is the more striking, as between the ages of twenty and fifty, difference of years is no way denoted by wrinkles of the skin, colour of the hair, or decrepitude of the body. On entering a hut, it is often difficult among adult persons to distinguish the father from the son, and not to confound one generation with another. I attribute this air of family resemblance to two different causes, the local situation of the Indian tribes, ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... Instances of decrepitude and deformity, are rarely known to exist among them: this is probably owing to the manner in which they are tended and nursed in infancy. It is not necessary that the mother should, as has been supposed, ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... the originality and splendor of the palaces of Vicenza and Venice which gave this school its eminence in the eyes of Europe; and the dying city, magnificent in her dissipation, and graceful in her follies, obtained wider worship in her decrepitude than in her youth, and sank from the midst of her admirers into ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... despite the prodigious care that the great magnifico, Don Juan Belvidero, took of himself, the days of decrepitude came upon him, and with those days the constant importunity of physical feebleness, an importunity all the more distressing by contrast with the wealth of memories of his impetuous youth and the sensual pleasures of middle age. The unbeliever ...
— The Elixir of Life • Honore de Balzac
... was diametrically opposed to all the teaching of the seventeenth-century moralists who had preceded him, and also had taught us that we should mistrust our passions and disdain our enthusiasms. To see how completely Vauvenargues rejected the Christian doctrine of the utter decrepitude and hopeless inherent badness of the human mind, we have but to gather some of his sparse thoughts together. He says, in defiance of Pascal and the Jansenists, "Mankind is the only source of our happiness, outside that there is nothing." Again, "As it is the heart, in most people, that doubts, so ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... word—mere smoke, that blinds you. The Christian seems to affirm three Gods, and even to aggravate this wickedness by calling one of them 'a Son,' thus seeming to accept that monstrous notion that God is liable to old age and decrepitude, so as to provide wisely against His own dotage. But all this is an error: these three apparent Gods are but one, and in the most absolute ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... retaining all the energy, but not the rashness of youth; age with vigour instead of decrepitude, delighting in the words of sound wisdom rather than the usual tattle of second childhood; and, withal, an old man who is prone to moralise as old men are; a man able and willing to do his duty in the present though his heart is left in the past; such is the most prominent figure ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 3, January 1876 • Various
... unimpaired; she was as young and as fresh at the finish as at the outset; whereas certain secondary personages, introduced into the story, wives and mothers of a neighboring little town, sank into physical and mental decay, and monstrous decrepitude. Mathieu considered the author's theory that all physical beauty and moral nobility belonged to virgins only, to be thoroughly imbecile, and he could not restrain himself from hinting his ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... tyrannical king about, no slavish subject to meet; no change of seasons overtakes them. The heaven and the earth take the places of Spring and Autumn. The king or emperor of a great nation cannot be happier than they." How would you be if death should never overtake you when ugly decrepitude makes you blind and deaf, bodily and mentally, and deprives you of all possible pleasures? How would you be if you should not die when your body is broken to pieces or terribly burned by an accident—say, ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... rishi," says Eitel, "is a man whose bodily frame has undergone a certain transformation by dint of meditation and ascetism, so that he is, for an indefinite period, exempt from decrepitude, age, and death. As this period is believed to extend far beyond the usual duration of human life, such persons are called, and popularly believed to be, immortals." Rishis are divided into various classes; and rishi-ism is spoken of as a seventh part of transrotation, and rishis are referred ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... meetings, the General was wont to survey himself long and fearsomely in the first mirror or show window that presented itself. He began to wonder if he was in failing health. At times he thought he discerned signs of approaching decrepitude, but his doctor assured him that he was never healthier or happier than he appeared to be at this ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... after dinner came in the Chancellor in good humour and spirits; talked of Lord Wellesley, who, since he has been in Ireland, has astonished everybody by his activity and assiduity in business. He appeared, before he went, in the last stage of decrepitude, and they had no idea the energy was in him; but they say he is quite a new man, and it is not merely a splash, but real and bona-fide business that he does. The Chancellor talked over some of the ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... between the making of the promise and the period fixed for its fulfillment, the less certain is the latter, where the security is simply the person of the debtor. It is chiefly in very uncivilized nations and also in nations in their decrepitude, and during periods of anarchy, and in despotisms, that personal security stands higher than any other. The same is true, though for other reasons, in very energetic civilized nations, where the people put a high estimate on the ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... slaveholders themselves and northern soldiers did not understand that they were fighting to free Negroes. The condition in which they were on arriving, moreover, was a new problem for the army. Some came naked, some in decrepitude, some afflicted with disease, and some wounded in their efforts to escape.[9] There were "women in travail, the helplessness of childhood and of old age, the horrors of sickness and of frequent deaths."[10] In their crude state ...
— A Century of Negro Migration • Carter G. Woodson
... that would not bear the light, made his support necessary to Pitt himself, and placed a fantastic political jobber at the helm of England in a time when she needed a patriot and a statesman. Newcastle was the growth of the decrepitude and decay of a great party, which had fulfilled its mission and done its work. But if the Whig soil had become poor for a wholesome crop, it was never so rich ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... features were sharp and diminutive, his face of a deadly white, his lips pale, and his hair of a mixture between red and white. He had very little show of beard— indeed, it was most difficult to say what his age might be. He might have been a sickly youth early sinking into decrepitude, or an old man, hale in constitution, yet carrying no flesh. But the most important feature, and that which immediately riveted the attention of Amine, was the eye of this peculiar personage—for he had but one; ...
— The Phantom Ship • Frederick Marryat
... &c. (Vol. iii., p. 203.).—The allusions in Hall's poem, stanzas iii. & v., refer to the fine allegorical description of human decrepitude in ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 74, March 29, 1851 • Various
... along the terrace, in the direction of the Place Louis XV., he caught sight of the aged Marquis de San-Real, who was walking on the arm of his valet, stepping with all the precautions due to gout and decrepitude. Dona Concha, who distrusted Henri, made Paquita pass between ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... with creaks and groans to crank it up. He was so long over the operation that she began to be alarmed. However, he was not drunk, only senile. Of the two, his taxi was far worse—rickety, spavined, with every evidence of decrepitude. It started with a jerk which threw ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... master are conspicuous—he has got rid of the cark and care, the anxiety and incessant worry of managing slaves; all the trouble and responsibility of rearing them from infancy, of their proper maintenance in health, and sickness, and decrepitude, of coercing them to labor, restraining, correcting, and punishing their faults and crimes—settling all their grievances and disputes. He is now entirely free from all apprehension of injury, revenge, or insurrection, however transient and momentary such impression may ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... remarked Mrs. Payne, in the tone in which she might have recited her creed in church, "and as far as a husband goes I have never observed that there was any disadvantage to be found in age. My experience of the world has taught me that decrepitude is the only thing which permanently ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... gentle, self-satisfied decrepitude worn by the old place was for the moment lost, and it looked new, clean-cut and almost gaudy, as it must have done in the distant days when it was young. It was a becoming day for the ancient building, as candle-light is becoming to an old beauty ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... a good deal in my time, and am grown foolish now, and out of bloom. But I do not hold the perverse belief of old men generally, that I am wiser than I was. And I hope I may never grow wise; 'tis a sign of decrepitude. If I thank God for life, it is not by virtue of any riper wisdom that has come to me with age, but because I have always taken a pleasure in life. Age gives no riper wisdom; age ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... either large or small? For this difficulty Carlino promptly found a remedy. The star will be there. It may be minute, lost in an immense profundity, but it will be there. The girl does not see it, but the priest sees it with the long-sightedness of decrepitude. Later, through faith, the girl ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... The student was hungry with his hundred-years' fast; and he sat down with the others at the common table to dine. But he had no sooner tasted the first spoonful of soup than his whole frame underwent a change. From a ruddy youth he became an old man in the last stage of decrepitude. His comrades scarce had time to hurry him upon a bed ere he breathed his last. Some pretty verses, attributed to Alaric A. Watts, commemorate a similar incident, said to have happened to two sisters who were nuns at Beverley Minister. ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... useful service. It enables comfortable people to delude themselves that all that can be done is being done to mitigate the misfortunes which the poor bring upon themselves. It obscures the truth that modern civilization has been perverted into a huge manufacturing of decrepitude and disease, of poverty and prostitution. The reason we talk so much and listen so eagerly when our magnificent benevolences are the subject is that we do not wish to be disturbed—and that we dearly love the tickling sensation in ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... at without the greatest interest. I knew so many of the old inmates, and so many pleasant hours had been passed there. What a blessing it has proved to thousands of England's brave tars, who would otherwise in their decrepitude have been cast helpless on the cold world! Above the hospital is another magnificent institution connected with it, I believe, where the sons of naval officers, as well as seamen, receive a first-rate nautical education. ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... antiquity. While the literatures of ancient Greece and Rome have largely perished in the convulsions that followed the breaking up of the Roman empire in Europe, when the kingdom of China fell into disorder and decrepitude this one great teacher stepped forward to save the precious record of historic fact, philosophical thought, and of legislation as well as poetry, from being swept away by the deluge of revolution. Confucius showed ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... first, that as its interests and affections here fade and fall away, in just that same proportion do they grow and gather there upon the further shore; and secondly that, after Nature's eternal fashion, the youth and vigour of a new generation is waiting to replace the worn-out decrepitude of that which sinks into oblivion. My life is done, it cannot be long before the churchyard claims its own, but I live again in my son; and take such cold comfort as I may from that idea of family, and of long-continued and assured succession, that has so largely helped ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... would keep alive the father's power in persons whose bodily strength had decayed; but the relations of Ulysses and Laertes in the Odyssee appear to show that, where extraordinary valour and sagacity were united in the son, the father in the decrepitude of age was deposed from the headship of the family. In the mature Greek jurisprudence, the rule advances a few steps on the practice hinted at in the Homeric literature; and though very many traces of stringent family obligation remain, the direct ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... ask for years of constant youth. "The years he granted, and had granted too "Eternal youth, had I his passion quench'd. "A virgin I remain; Apollo's gift "Despis'd: but now the age of joy is fled; "Decrepitude with trembling steps has come, "Which long I must endure. Seven ages now "I have existed; ere the number'd grains "Are equall'd, thrice an hundred harvests I, "And thrice an hundred vintages must see. "The time will come, my body, shrunk with age, "And wither'd limbs, shall to small ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... Bedney warily resolved to decline all overtures, by taking refuge in his decrepitude; but the attorney's ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... for there will be changes at the old place after awhile. Every time you go you will find more gray hairs on father's head and more wrinkles on mother's brow; and after awhile you will notice that the elastic step has become decrepitude. And some day one of the two pillars of your early home will fall, and after awhile the other pillar of that home will fall, and it will be a comfort to yourself if, when they are gone, you can feel that while you are faithful in your new home ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... of frequent and abrupt changes in its rulers: like so many previous dynasties, that of Nabopolassar became enfeebled as if from exhaustion immediately after the death of its most illustrious scion, and foundered in imbecility and decrepitude. Popular imagination, awe-struck by such a sudden downfall from exalted prosperity, recognised the hand of God in the events which brought about the catastrophe. A Chaldaean legend, current not long after, related how Nebuchadrezzar, being seized towards the end ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... is that death often turns from the sickly to the healthy, from the decrepitude of age to the strong man in his prime, from the miserable wretch who longs for the grave to the smiling babe upon its mother's breast, and there in those "azure veins which steal like streams along a field ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... Until there is a more general demand for a higher concept of marriage, it is quite certain that the world will worry along with the one which now does duty for the majority, although it must be admitted that the poor thing gives evidence of much decrepitude and suffers from as many complaints as ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... almost supernaturally noble qualities, while they attribute every conceivable enormity to their enemies the Turks. Each of these views is incorrect. The Osmanlis, whether it be from a consciousness of their own decrepitude, or some other cause, appear to have lost the spirit of cruelty which characterised their more successful days; and it is a matter of fact that the atrocities committed by their Christian antagonists in the Greek War of Independence, during the ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... which they now have time, and the hard work so deformed their tender bodies that they could not pass the army test. This is their modulation to the dominant, their awakening to life. It is not a pleasing prospect; nor is the early autumn of ill-health and decrepitude to which it naturally leads any more pleasing. They pass their lives in the dark, morally and physically, and frequently a sudden fall of rock cripples, if it does not destroy, the victim; then there are broken pieces of a different kind to be taken along the low dark galleries and brought ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... on the tables of the law, and was it thus left to bear its eternal testimony to His beneficence among these clouds of Heaven? Or is it the descendant of a long race of mountains, existing under appointed laws of birth and endurance, death and decrepitude? There can be no doubt as to the answer. The rock itself answers audibly by the murmur of some falling stone or rending pinnacle. It is not as it was once. Those waste leagues around its feet are loaded with the wrecks of what it was. On these perhaps, of all mountains, ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... of all was, that this young girl had not come into the world to be homely. In her early childhood she must even have been pretty. The grace of her age was still struggling against the hideous, premature decrepitude of debauchery and poverty. The remains of beauty were dying away in that face of sixteen, like the pale sunlight which is extinguished under hideous clouds at ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... visibly going to pieces. There were several more besides, as for instance that Rose had already fifteen hundred a year from her father. The figure had been betrayed in Hill Street; it was part of the proof of Mrs. Tramore's decrepitude. Then there was an equal amount that her mother had to dispose of and on which the girl could absolutely count, though of course it might involve much waiting, as the mother, a person of gross insensibility, evidently wouldn't die of cold-shouldering. Equally definite, to do it justice, ...
— The Chaperon • Henry James
... opposite. These houses opposite, compared with Gable Inn, are of a mushroom modernness, and yet are old enough (having begun with a debauched and sickly constitution) to have fallen into an almost complete decrepitude. Their stately neighbour seems to be less grimy with the London smoke than they are, has always been less susceptible to outside evil influences, even of that unescapable sort, and drives them to an added shabbiness of senility by contrast with its own hale old ...
— Young Mr. Barter's Repentance - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... have, by the use of the word "grandfather," given you an idea of decrepitude and old age, in the case of Bobby's grandfather, I wish at once to ...
— What Two Children Did • Charlotte E. Chittenden
... thoroughly well. Occasionally only do we meet with an example of vigorous health continued to old age; hourly do we meet with examples of acute disorder, chronic ailment, general debility, premature decrepitude. Scarcely is there one to whom you put the question, who has not, in the course of his life, brought upon himself illness from which a little knowledge would have saved him. Here is a case of heart disease consequent on a rheumatic fever that followed ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... grave—no pillow on which to forget its cares but the dust. The sight of these wretched old men, turned out from, the little holdings that sheltered their helplessness, to beg a morsel, through utter charity, in the decrepitude of life, was enough to make a man wish that he had never been born to witness such a wanton abuse of that power which was entrusted to man for the purpose of diffusing happiness instead of misery. All these were known to Raymond, who, as far as he could, gave me their brief and unfortunate history. ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... ingenious reasons, hidden grace and beauty, unknown charm and mystery in the various phenomena of Nature. God created only coarse beings, full of the germs of disease, who, after a few years of bestial enjoyment, grow old and infirm, with all the ugliness and all the want of power of human decrepitude. He seems to have made them only in order that they may reproduce their species in an ignoble manner and then die like ephemeral insects. I said reproduce their species in an ignoble manner and I ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... instance with certainty:—A relative near and dear to us as life's blood, had by money and comforts, (which but for this incident would have been kept secret), for many months relieved an inmate of a London hospital. The patient was a poor, old female, in the last stage of decrepitude, and fast sinking beneath the sorrows of life. She had seen happier days, and the only relic which she possessed of better fortune, was a pair of silver framed spectacles; which, on her death-bed, she bequeathed to her benefactress. The poor old woman's relations ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 383, August 1, 1829 • Various
... conceive it possible for life to subsist in a form so nearly composed of mere skin and bone as that of M. de Voltaire." Extremely lean old Gentleman! "He complained of decrepitude, and said, He supposed I was anxious to form an idea of the figure of one walking after death. However, his eyes and whole countenance are still full of fire; and though so emaciated, a more lively ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... long ago caught sight of one of these distinctions that cut clear through to the roots of things. He says that the sign of old age is that a man is "afraid of that which is high." When courage and ambition have gone old age and decrepitude have entered in, no matter whether a man ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... but he was by no means enervated. During the term of nearly fifty years that I lived with him, I received, according to Indian customs, all the kindness and attention that was my due as his wife.—Although war was his trade from his youth till old age and decrepitude stopt his career, he uniformly treated me with tenderness, and never ...
— A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison • James E. Seaver
... called upon to consider the uncertainty of human life, the immutable certainty of death, and the vanity of all human pursuits. Decrepitude and decay are written upon every living thing. The cradle and the coffin stand in juxtaposition to each other; and it is a melancholy truth that so soon as we begin to live, that moment we also begin to die. It is passing strange that, notwithstanding the daily mementos of mortality that ...
— Masonic Monitor of the Degrees of Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft and Master Mason • George Thornburgh
... love-epistles of William Mainwaring. She had not recurred to them for years. Perhaps she now felt that food necessary to the sustainment of her fiendish designs. It was a strange spectacle to see this being, so full of vital energy, mobile and restless as a serpent, condemned to that helpless decrepitude, chained to the uneasy seat, not as in the resigned and passive imbecility of extreme age, but rather as one whom in the prime of life the rack has broken, leaving the limbs inert, the mind active, the form as one dead, the heart with superabundant ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... but one object in life—you know that it is the opinion of an old man who has seen the beginning and the end of many movements in society and in the Church, and who has learned that the Church, for all her decrepitude, is yet the most stable thing that the world has seen. I have to thank you ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... diseases being transmitted by enemies. Indeed, they that desire to slay others, send poison in the shape of customary gifts, so that the man that taketh the powders so sent, by tongue or skin, is, without doubt, speedily deprived of life. Women have sometimes caused dropsy and leprosy, decrepitude and impotence and idiocy and blindness and deafness in men. These wicked women, ever treading in the path of sin, do sometimes (by these means) injure their husbands. But the wife should never do the least injury ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... heroic rudeness which give a charm to the early popular tales and songs of Europe find, of course, no counterpart on our soil. Instead of emerging from the twilight of the past, the first American writings were produced under the garish noon of a modern and learned age. Decrepitude rather than youthfulness is the mark of a colonial literature. The poets, in particular, instead of finding a challenge to their imagination in the new life about them, are apt to go on imitating the cast off literary fashions of the mother country. America was settled by Englishmen who were ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... renders the Sea Facade as important as that to the Piazzetta. There was only a narrow walk between the pillars and the water; and the old palace of Ziani still faced the Piazzetta, and interrupted, by its decrepitude, the magnificence of the square where ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... resumed D'Artagnan, "to this decrepitude is probably added poverty, for he must have neglected the little that he had, and the dirty scoundrel, Grimaud, more taciturn than ever and still more drunken than his master—stay, Planchet, it breaks my heart ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... oh! it was a sad sight to see them do it. The younger women ran actively, carrying the infants and leading the smaller children by the hands, and soon disappeared; but it was otherwise with the old people. These, men and women, bowed with age, and tottering as much from terror as decrepitude, hobbled along, panting as they went, and stumbling over every trifling obstruction in their path, being sometimes obliged to stop and rest, though death might be the consequence; and among these there were a few ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... anchor there was a strong temptation to take the canoe, leaving some adequate reward. The self-denial is almost regretted, for the old man with the thin white tuft on his chin, his shyness, his hatred of strangers, and delusions of his decrepitude, are characteristic of an age soon to be of the irrecoverable past. A canoe from such accomplished hands would have represented a complimentary record of a race deficient in ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... thrown off in the waste-weir of our great commercial and manufacturing cities and towns, whose population, without the infusion—and that continually—of the strong, substantial, and vigorous life blood of the country, would soon dwindle into insignificance and decrepitude. Why then should not this first, primitive, health-enjoying and life-sustaining class of our people be equally accommodated in all that gives to social and substantial life, its due development? It is absurd to deny them by others, or that they deny themselves, the least of such ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... the Sphinx's description of it;—morning, noon, and night. I would know night, as well as morning and noon.' JOHNSON. 'What, Sir, would you know what it is to feel the evils of old age? Would you have the gout? Would you have decrepitude?'—Seeing him heated, I would not argue any farther; but I was confident that I was in the right. I would, in due time, be a Nestor, an elder of the people; and there SHOULD be some difference between the conversation of twenty-eight and sixty-eight. A grave picture should not be gay. There ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... like two ill-tempered hounds, coupled by a tyrannical sportsman, they should drag on their indissoluble fetter, snarling and growling, and pulling in different directions? What can be expected for their wretched offspring, but sickness and suffering, premature decrepitude, and untimely death? In this, as in every other institution of civilised society, avarice, luxury, and disease constitute the TRIANGULAR HARMONY of the life of man. Avarice conducts him to the abyss of toil and crime: luxury seizes on his ill-gotten spoil; and, while he revels in her ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... face, partly inclosed in grey whiskers. Four dollars would have been a sufficient price to pay for the garments he stood in, including the wrecked hat he held in his hands and the broken, misshaped shoes on his feet. A purchaser who gave more than four dollars for the whole in its present state of decrepitude would have been but a poor hand ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... eternal in nations is shortlived for the individual being. Brief, indeed, in the life of each is that season which lasts for ever in the life of all. From the old age of nations glory fades away; but in their utmost decrepitude there is still a generation young enough to love. To the individual man, however, glory alone remains when the snows of ages have fallen, and love is but the memory of a boyish dream. No wonder that the Greek genius, half incredulous of the soul, ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... his tools, but the glow of the furnace is quenched forever now. The slowly gathering ferruginous deposits have been exhausted, and three years have elapsed since the furnace-fires were lighted. The blackened shell of the building stands in cold decrepitude, a melancholy vestige of usefulness outlived. In consequence of the stoppage of the works, Hanover has lost seven-eighths of its population, and only about fifty inhabitants remain in the white cottages grouped ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... slept in. The lining of the ulster he had thrown across a chair had been patched, and threads hung where his legs had rubbed it. The impressions reflected in William's eyes were increasingly disagreeable ones, as he diagnosed moral, physical, and financial decrepitude. It was nothing short of impudence on Jack's part to intrude himself upon the town and upon his family. It was with a slight sneer that William replied to his ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... subordination prevails particularly among the oldest inhabitants of the plantation, who were once the absolute chattels of its owner, and who look upon that fact as creating an obligation in him to support them in their decrepitude. Being too far in the sere and yellow leaf to work, they are provided every month with enough rations to meet their wants, and in total idleness they calmly await the inevitable hour when their bones will be laid beside those of their fathers. There are few more picturesque figures than ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... babies from the water sprinkling and inoculate them with disease to save them from catching it accidentally; then you will take to politics, where you will become the catspaw of corrupt functionaries and the henchman of ambitious humbugs; and the end will be despair and decrepitude, broken nerve and shattered hopes, vain regrets for that worst and silliest of wastes and sacrifices, the waste and sacrifice of the power of enjoyment: in a word, the punishment of the fool who pursues the better before he has secured ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... bishop. He is now in his sixty-eighth year, having been born in Durham in 1717. He lived to the age of nearly eighty- eight, and one who remembered him In his latest years says: "He rises to my mind the very ideal of age and decrepitude—a small, emaciated old man, very lame, his ashen and withered features surmounted sometimes by a cap, and sometimes by a small wig— always quiet and gentle in his manner." Such a condition as is here described is still, however, ...
— Report Of Commemorative Services With The Sermons And Addresses At The Seabury Centenary, 1883-1885. • Diocese Of Connecticut
... cities. New Orleans. Hint to legislators. A horrid picture. Not wholly imaginary. Avoid the first erring step. Example of premature decrepitude. Anecdote of C. S. Solitary vice. This vice compared with intemperance. A set of wretches exposed. Apologies sometimes made. Nature of the evils this error produces. The law of God. Medical testimony. Entire celibacy, or purity, not unfavorable to health. ...
— The Young Man's Guide • William A. Alcott
... a purely reared child is putting a stone in the foundation of prosperity for this wonderful new civilization, which will go on evolving, or die of decrepitude, just as its central dynamic force, the sex life of the people, finally decides. Sex immorality is, as every one knows, one of the signs of the approaching death ...
— The Renewal of Life; How and When to Tell the Story to the Young • Margaret Warner Morley
... decay of the city of Venice is, in many respects, like that of an outwearied and aged human frame; the cause of its decrepitude is indeed at the heart, but the outward appearances of it are first at the extremities. In the centre of the city there are still places where some evidence of vitality remains, and where, with kind closing of ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... first look at the prospectus," he said, preferring not to attack the question of figures at once; and with his eyeglasses on his nose, he began, in a declamatory tone, always upon the stage: "When one considers coolly the decrepitude which dramatic art has reached in France, when one measures the distance that separates the stage ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... that, when you find a better opportunity, you will try to procure me this favor. My only trust is in your support; and I am persuaded that, having the honor to be so closely connected with you, you would reproach yourself, if you saw me sink into decrepitude, without resources and without honors." [Footnote: Frontenac au Ministre, 15 Sept., 1692.] And still again he appeals to the minister for "some permanent and honorable place attended with the marks of distinction, which are more grateful than all ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... sharp twinge of pain shot through his anatomy, the bundle stirred, and instantly resolved itself into the quaintest figure of a little, old, bowed Indian woman that it is possible to picture. But, notwithstanding her extreme age and apparent decrepitude, the extraordinary old creature displayed marvellous activity. In an instant she was on her feet and beside the pallet, peering eagerly and anxiously into Harry's wide-open eyes. The result of her inspection appeared ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... Wagner uses it; the second (c) is by way of being a study for the best of the Parsifal themes. It must be remarked, in passing, that the study is much more finely used than when his powers, largely exhausted by a tedious struggle with the world, had got into a state of decrepitude. ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... and gypsy luxury of color: sag-roofed barns and stables, and weak-backed, sunken-chested workshops of every sort lounge along in tumble-down succession, and lean up against the cliff in every imaginable posture of worthlessness and decrepitude; light wooden galleries cross to them from the second stories of the houses which back upon the alley; and over these galleries flutters, from a labyrinth of clothes-lines, a variety of bright-colored garments of all ages, sexes, and conditions; while the footway underneath abounds in gossiping ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... back in this emergency, with more agility than could have been anticipated in a man of his apparent decrepitude; and, seizing up the pot, prepared to hurl it at his assailant's head. But Charley Bates, at this moment, calling his attention by a perfectly terrific howl, he suddenly altered its destination, and flung it full at ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... homeless tenements. Dreariest of all is a deserted mining village, and there are many such—the shaft having been worked out, or an unquenchable subterranean fire left to smolder in neglect. Here the tipple has fallen into creaking decrepitude; the cabins are without windows or doors—these having been taken to some newer hamlet; ridge-poles are sunken, chimneys tottering; soot covers the gaunt bones, which for all the world are like a row of skeletons, perched high, and grinning down at you in their misery; ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... lay the pipe, fashioned of the 'foam of perilous seas in fairy lands forlorn,' the pipe on which, perchance, some swain had discoursed sweet music near the shady heights of High Holborn. The cradle of infancy, the gamp of decrepitude, the tricycle of fleeting youth, the paraffin lamp which had lighted bridal gaiety, the flask which had held the foaming malt,—all were gathered here, and the dust lay deep on ...
— HE • Andrew Lang
... the great chair! Behind it glimmered the Donatello figure, and the divine Hermes, a glorious shape in the dusk, looking scorn on human decrepitude. All round spread the dim walls of books. The life they had nourished was dropping into the abyss out of ken—they remained. Sixty years of effort and slavery to end so—a river lost ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Corpus, and since that time some sixty new ones have been discovered. And then—the stone lions of Roman days, couched forlornly at street corners, in courtyards and at fountains, in every stage of decrepitude, with broken jaws and noses, missing legs and tails! Venosa is a veritable infirmary for mutilated antiques of this species. Now the lion is doubtless a nobly decorative beast, but—toujours perdrix! ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... poncho over his shoulders, and sandals on his feet. His projecting, dropping lower jaw exhibited the few decayed teeth he had in his head, which, with his lustreless eyes, made him look the very picture of decrepitude. He brightened up and rose, however, as he saw Uncle Richard,—with whom he was acquainted, and who had frequently shown him kindness,—and welcomed ...
— In New Granada - Heroes and Patriots • W.H.G. Kingston |
