Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 9, 2025
"There is no need for that! Here I live in excellent company, the work progresses, and well, why should I deny it? There was something specially to mark to-day; I met an old acquaintance again." "An old one?" "I have already known her sixteen years; but when I first saw her she was in swaddling clothes." "Then this venerable damsel friend is more than sixteen, perhaps seventeen!
Let well alone, and it will continue to be well with you; but why should you thus persist to peer into the bottom of your past; as it were, asking the fashion of your swaddling clothes? Fie! you are too impatient; too importunate. Pray, no longer question me against my will, making enquiries that may not be answered. Live without asking why you live. No more of this.
The passions of youth never influence my admiration, and when I am as withered, decrepit, wrinkled, as Tithonus in his swaddling bands, my opinion will be still the same. But I forgive your incredulity and want of sympathy.
A very young brother of his, who was in swaddling clothes, was still alive and crying abandoned in his cradle. This was all that remained to Claude of his family; the young man took the child under his arm and went off in a pensive mood. Up to that moment, he had lived only in science; he now began to live in life. This catastrophe was a crisis in Claude's existence.
Never before in his life had he been brought into close personal contact with "the cloth" as he termed it, and even this "swaddling garment" was having a slow-growing hold upon him. Presently Jock came timidly out, after his last visit to the kitchen, with pipes and a tobacco-box.
The result of this history of insult and degradation has been both fearful and glorious. It has birthed the haunting prostitute, the brawler, and the beast of burden; but it has also given the world an efficient womanhood, whose strength lies in its freedom and whose chastity was won in the teeth of temptation and not in prison and swaddling clothes.
She came to Dover Street several times to study our tiny Celia, in swaddling clothes improvised by my mother, after the fashion of the old country. Miss Hale wanted a baby for a picture of the Nativity which she was doing for her father's church; and of all the babies in Boston, our Celia, our little Jewish Celia, was posing for the Christ Child!
Hence it follows that we should leave as much as possible to Nature; and the more the babe is left free to develop, the more rapidly and perfectly will he achieve his proper proportions and higher functions. Thus swaddling bands are abolished, and the "utmost tranquillity in a restful position" is recommended.
The elder master might indeed have written the magnificent speech which ushers in with gradual rhetoric and splendid reticence the black suggestion of a deed without a name; his hand might have woven with no less imperial skill the elaborate raiment of words and images which wraps up in fold upon fold, as with swaddling- bands of purple and golden embroidery, the shapeless and miscreated birth of a murderous purpose that labours into light even while it loathes the light and itself; but only Shakespeare could give us the first sample of that more secret and terrible knowledge which reveals itself in the brief heavy whispers that seal the commission and sign the warrant of the king.
A man maybe buried at a hundred and may never have lived at all. He would have fared better had he died young. Our wisdom is slavish prejudice, our customs consist in control, constraint, compulsion. Civilised man is born and dies a slave. The infant is bound up in swaddling clothes, the corpse is nailed down in his coffin. All his life long man is imprisoned by our institutions.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking