United States or France ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


I had kept up my spirits when many a more vigorous frame had sunk, and many a maturer mind had desponded; but the perpetual recurrence of the same dreary spectacles, the dying, and the more fortunate dead, covering the highways, the fields, and the village streets, at length sank into my soul.

It is a great mistake on the part of elderly people, male and female, to tell a child that he is seeing his happiest days. Don't you believe a word of it, my little friend. The burdens of childhood are as hard to bear as the crosses that weigh us down later in life, while the happinesses of childhood are tame compared with those of our maturer years.

Its membership was pledged to one another by unusual ties. It was the hardest society for a fellow to get into in any one of the seven colleges whereat it flourished, and its mystic bonds were not shaken off with the silken gown and "mortar board" of undergraduate days, but followed its membership through many a maturer year. It was a society most college men might ask to join in vain.

We had identified the unhappy woman whom I had met in the night-time with Anne Catherick we had made some advance, at least, towards connecting the probably defective condition of the poor creature's intellect with the peculiarity of her being dressed all in white, and with the continuance, in her maturer years, of her childish gratitude towards Mrs.

I would readily undertake to do the same for all the pieces of Shakspeare's maturer years, but to do this would require a separate book. Here I am reduced to confine my observations to the tracing his great designs with a rapid pencil; but still I must previously be allowed to deliver my sentiments in a general manner on the subject of his most eminent peculiarities.

I have reserved till this last letter what I have to say to you on the most important subject of all: the infinitely momentous subject of religious culture and duty. In the first place I must explain that there is a great difference between the methods and circumstances of religious instruction now and those which surrounded the youth of the maturer generation.

They were admitted at once as full members without any previous association, an honour which was due to the great promise they exhibited in their earlier career, and which both have amply fulfilled in their maturer years. There are thirty members and twenty associates of the Royal Scottish Academy. Having said so much as to Mr.

If we meet a child only as if he were of our age, our attitude tends to make him a little prig; if we meet him as if we were as young as he is, his need for maturer influences produces a lack of balance which we must both feet; but if we sincerely meet him as if the exchange of age were mutual, we find common ground and valuable companionship.

Just as the clever young graduate is tempted to dictate his own admirable history notes to a class of boys, or to puzzle them with the latest theories in archaeology or philosophy, so the literary teacher is apt to dazzle his pupils with brilliant but to them unintelligible criticism, or to surfeit them with literary history, or to impose upon them an inappropriate literary diet because it happens to suit his maturer taste or even his caprice.

But no; in the pursuit of ambition, in the acquisition of wealth, in the thirst after power, and the craving after distinction, nay, nineteen times out of twenty, in the most frivolous occupations, the most unsatisfactory amusements, do the great mass of the maturer man sink those feelings; divested of which, we become mere plodders on the earth, mere creatures of materialism: nor is it until after age and infirmity have overtaken them, they look back with regret to that real and substantial, but unenjoyed happiness, which the occupied heart and the soul's communion alone can bestow.