Old is applied to a person or thing that has existed for a long time or that existed in the distant past.

It has become luminous, and its clear rays, penetrating the abyss of the remote past, have brought within our ken some stages of the evolution of the earth.

It was a relic from the dim past.

That way has little to recommend it, and indeed I learned little, for the modern world has obliterated with its terrible footsteps nearly all that might have remained of our humble and yet so glorious past, and it was still early morning when I crossed the Hampshire boundary and came into the little town of Emsworth, once famous for its trade in foreign wines, now, I suppose, best known as a yachting station.

No wonder that Nelly Lebrun stood with her hand against her cheek, looking him over, smiling happily at him, and questioning him about his immediate past all in the same glance.

This my unfailing prospect for a fortnight past!

To his dazed and sickened brain it came like a call from out of the far past, and he raised his head and listened.

"If we are going," said this truly patriotic American, "to leave the historic past and present, and take our manifest destiny into the account, why restrict ourselves within the narrow limits assigned by our fellow-countryman who has just sat down?

We left Carlisle at a little past eleven, and within the half-hour were at Gretna Green.

He goes back to that bitter past, shrinking; but he knows its meaning now.

Does the old laughter never ring again through all the brilliant past, so full of bright, and beautiful, and happy figuresfigures which illustrated and advanced that past with such a glory as now lives not upon earth?

A most holy hermit" "A hermit!" says she, merry-eyed, "then, an he told thee this, needs must he be old, and cold, and withered, and beyond the age of love, knowing nought of women save what memory doth haunt his evil past.

Let any allusion to the painful past be treated, not merely as an offence against good manners, but as what it practically is, an offence against the British Government; and that Government will find in them, I believe, loyal citizens and able servants.

But you turn, instead, into the quiet, narrow way which a lover of Creole antiquity, in fondness for a romantic past, is still prone to call the Rue Royale.

Voices we loved sound from those far-off lands, And thrill our hearts; life's golden sands Are dropping fast; Soon shall we meet by the river of peace, and say, As the night flees before the eye of day, So faded from our eyes the mournful past, At last.

Instead of looking to the land of dreams and the misty past, like the Celtic writers, Masefield and Gibson, two younger English poets, have found in the everyday life of the present time the themes for their verse.

He sighed as his mind flickered back into the heroic past.

On the day when these last vestiges of such a grand past are effaced from our soulswe shall cease to exist!

But your pride of race, turning away from the unhappy past, sees your Golden Age in the days to come, not in the dim yesterdays.

I offer you a career of action in which you may forget the great sorrow which has fallen upon you: and in the battles which lie before you, you will find oblivion for the sad past which lies behind you.

What can her thoughts have been for the last twenty-one years, if she still remembers?" With a gesture he put this dreadful past which he knew from him.

He had a vivid imagination, and the shattered desk suggested an exciting and pleasurable moment in the near past.

Among these dear places Chichester is no exception, rather is she most typical; she has an immemorial past, and out of it she will contrive somehow or other to face and to outface whatever the future may bring.

Catherine's handwriting, on the contrary, was still stimulating, if indeed I ever found it more so in the foolish past.

In the chapter on inventio, however, the lady seems to have forgotten all about her traditional past, for instead of discussing the method of finding all possible arguments in favor of a case, she discusses the poets, their purpose, and their fame.