"Sisterhood" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of her associates but very willing and eager. As between the three—the noblewoman, the working woman and the woman of the street—the medical officials in charge made no distinction whatsoever. Why should they? In this sisterhood of mercy they all three stood upon the same common ground. I never knew that slop jars were noble things until I saw women in these military lazarets bearing them in their arms; then to me they ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... Amarna cannot be deceived," calmly reproved the black shape on the dais. "They see behind the flimsy veil and deep into your thoughts. Your face is as the face of her who so lately sought me. The bond of sisterhood stretches between you. That which is invisible to the naked eye is visible to me. The road of the past winds clear and white before me. ...
— Grace Harlowe's Golden Summer • Jessie Graham Flower
... doctrine, which his father, Duke Philip, had upheld so bravely. And if the young lord held the true faith (as she hoped by his saying he was a Christian), if so, then she would die happy, and the sooner the better—even if it were this night, for she was the last of all the sisterhood, all the other nuns having died of grief; and so she went ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... room. DONNERWITZ's knife is now brandishing peas; his offended napkin chokes him; with the yell and spring of a corpulent hyena, he rises and rushes to the windows. The timid pensionnaire and her shrinking sisterhood follow him, under the misconception that he is summoning them to admire the sunset; the sunset is their evening excitement, and DONNERWITZ can be sentimental in his calmer moments; but no "Wie wunder, wunderschoen!" escapes him; a Saxon word, that even they can understand, is on his lips; ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 1, 1892 • Various
... live here," I explained, "because this is the Begynenhof, half almshouse, half nunnery, which has been kept up since our great year, 1574. But oddly enough the chapel of the sisterhood who established it, has been turned into an English church. Queer, in the little Catholic village hidden away from the great city; but so it is. And isn't ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... know, were not according to the old form in which such licences, faculties, and powers usually ran, which in like cases had heretofore been granted to the sisterhood. But it was according to a neat Formula of Didius his own devising, who having a particular turn for taking to pieces, and new framing over again all kind of instruments in that way, not only hit upon this ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... for the first time gave the United States an unquestioned place in the sisterhood of modern nations. Though the population in 1815 was only about eight and a half millions, the success of the navy inspired a wholesome respect for Yankee ships and Yankee sailors. In place of the captured ships a new merchant marine was quickly ...
— The Mentor: The War of 1812 - Volume 4, Number 3, Serial Number 103; 15 March, 1916. • Albert Bushnell Hart
... a five and came Of a coifed sisterhood. (O Deutschland, double a desperate name! O world wide of its good! But Gertrude, lily, and Luther, are two of a town, Christ's lily and beast of the waste wood: From life's dawn it is drawn down, Abel is Cain's brother and breasts they have ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... Nineteenth century, (as grandly poetic as any, only different,) with steamships, railroads, factories, electric telegraphs, cylinder presses—to the thought of the solidarity of nations, the brotherhood and sisterhood of the entire earth—to the dignity and heroism of the practical labor of farms, factories, foundries, workshops, mines, or on shipboard, or on lakes and rivers—resumes that other medium of expression, more flexible, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... value? It is certainly genuine, for it induces an occasional charity visitor to live in a tenement house as simply as the other tenants do. It drives others to give up visiting the poor altogether, because, they claim, it is quite impossible unless the individual becomes a member of a sisterhood, which requires, as some of the Roman Catholic sisterhoods do, that the member first take the vows of obedience and poverty, so that she can have nothing to give save as it is first given to her, and thus she is not harassed by ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... ranks—some Englishmen, several Scotchmen, and many Irish. For them the English ladies had organized a special service. Lady St. Jerome, with unflagging zeal, presided over this department; and the superior of the sisterhood of mercy, that shrank from no toil and feared no danger in the fulfilment of those sacred duties of pious ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... of God, that the Indian missions should not suffer loss. It believed that the growing claim of the Southern mountain work and the claim of this great African race in our midst would not be disregarded. It still believes in the churches. There has been only a temporary withholding. In the sisterhood of missionary societies, two have been freed from debt. Now by one grand concentration of gifts to the Jubilee Fund of the American Missionary Association, shall it not be enabled to celebrate a remarkable record, a marvelous work, a divine call ...
— American Missionary - Volume 50, No. 9, September, 1896 • Various
... thought to bear her to Provence, where, near The city of Marseilles a borough stood, Which had a sumptuous monastery; here Of ladies was a holy sisterhood; And, hither to transport the cavalier, They stowed his body in a chest of wood, Made in a town by the way-side; and which Was long and roomy, and ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... indeed things are to be as they now are in at least one princely mansion of this country, where books, in thousands upon thousands, are jumbled together with no more arrangement than a sack of coals; where not even the sisterhood of consecutive volumes has been respected; where undoubtedly an intending reader may at the mercy of Fortune take something from the shelves that is a book; but where no particular book can except by the ...
— On Books and the Housing of Them • William Ewart Gladstone
... the Murano convent who had been friends in their love for him. In conjunction they had bestowed upon him hours of incomparable sweetness. When Olivo, in a whisper, began to speak of the strict discipline imposed upon this sisterhood—once they were professed, the nuns must never appear unveiled before a man, and they were vowed to perpetual silence—a smile flitted across ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... himself." The emperor laughs at her simplicity. "Go, fool," says the matron: then turning to the emperor, "Your greatness will pardon her ignorance!" After her, several others of different characters are instructed to mistake who he is in the same manner: then the whole sisterhood are called together, and the emperor rises, and cocking his hat, declares, he is the Great Mogul, and they his concubines. A general murmur goes through the assembly, and Aurengezebe certifying, that he keeps them for state rather than use, tells ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... devoted herself indefatigably to the improvement of schools for the native children whom the mission had gathered round it, Mrs. Mattoon shared her labors by occasionally teaching in the palace, which was for some time thrown open to the ladies of her faithful sisterhood. Here, as elsewhere, the blended force and gentleness of her character wrought marvels in the impressible and grateful minds to which she ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... suite of rooms, we were conducted through a corresponding suite on the opposite side of the entrance-hall. These latter apartments are most richly adorned with tapestries, wrought and presented to the first Duke by a sisterhood of Flemish nuns; they look like great, glowing pictures, and completely cover the walls of the rooms. The designs purport to represent the Duke's battles and sieges; and everywhere we see the hero himself, as large as life, and as gorgeous in scarlet and gold as the holy sisters ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... a briefless barrister, frequenting the courts on their own peregrinations, to catch the eye of client or judge, he was at Clinton, Illinois, where a case came up of a very modern nature. To be sure, "the Shrieking Sisterhood" was then invented for the advocates of female suffrage and anti-slavery. But these twelve or fifteen young women presented themselves in custody for a novel charge. They had failed to induce a liquor dealer to restrict his license, and "smashed" his ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... young to make the anxious lines upon her forehead seem at home there, too patient to be burdened with the labor others should have shared, too light of heart to be pent up when earth and sky were keeping a blithe holiday. But she was one of that meek sisterhood who, thinking humbly of themselves, believe they are honored by being spent in the service of less conscientious souls, whose careless ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... perplexity to visitors. They are with difficulty taught by the friend who is lionizing them to distinguish it from the University. But the University of Oxford is a federation of colleges, of which University College is one, resembling in all respects the rest of the sisterhood, being, like them, under the federal authority of the University, retaining the same measure of college right, conducting the domestic instruction and discipline of its students through its own officers, but sending them to the lecture rooms of the University Professors for the higher ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... the sisterhood of electricity and magnetism, consists in the origin of both of them from the earth, or common mass of matter. The eduction of electricity from the earth is shown by an insulated cushion soon ceasing to supply either the vitreous or resinous ether to the whirling globe of glass or of sulphur; ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... being and risk existence to content thee and devise thee a device wherewith, though it cost me my dear life and all I hold dear, thou mayst get possession of her and accomplish thy desire, if such be the will of Allah Almighty. But I charge thee, O my brother, keep the matter secret from my sisterhood and discover not thy case to any one of them, lest my life be lost with thy life. An they question thee of opening the forbidden door, reply to them, 'I opened it not; no, never; but I was troubled at heart for your absence and by ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... Kitchener asked her to marry him. He was over forty then; she was nineteen. She told him of her engagement, of course—told him also that it might be she would never marry at all; a life of her own and happiness seemed impossible now. She might go into a sisterhood. Work for others was what she must have. Then, unexpectedly, my father was at Cairo to meet her, and Kitchener went to him and told him. From that on the two men were close friends. My people were not married till five years later, and when I came to be baptized ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... only usurp one more of what have hitherto been almost exclusively man's rights—the profession of architecture—she would in truth become the architect, not only of her own fortune, but of the fortunes of a suffering sisterhood, whose great plaint is, "So many things and no place to put them!" For who ever knew a mere man, architect and artist of the beautiful though he were, who had even the beginning of a realization of the absolute necessity for closets—large ones, light ones, and plenty of them? In his special castle, ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... not easy to be borne Fell suddenly upon my spirit, cast From the dread bosom of the unknown past, When first I saw that sisterhood forlorn;— And Her, whose strength and stature seem to scorn The power of years—pre-eminent, and placed Apart, to overlook the circle vast. Speak, Giant-mother! tell it to the Morn, While she dispels the cumbrous shades of night; Let the Moon hear, emerging ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... fair young flowers, that lately sprang and stood In brighter light and softer airs, a beauteous sisterhood? Alas! they all are in their graves; the gentle race of flowers Are lying in their lowly beds, with the fair and good of ours. The rain is falling where they lie; but the cold November rain Calls not from out the gloomy earth ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... I can express no otherwise the sort of interest my companions inspired. How can I describe that except by saying that instead of growing used to them—and it's a marvel for a governess: I call the sisterhood to witness!—I made constant fresh discoveries. There was one direction, assuredly, in which these discoveries stopped: deep obscurity continued to cover the region of the boy's conduct at school. It had been promptly given me, I have noted, to face that mystery without a pang. ...
— The Turn of the Screw • Henry James
... withholding the elective franchise from those who do desire it. Freedom of choice, liberty to choose their own sphere, is what is asked. We have not heard that the most ardent apostles of female suffrage propose to compel any woman to make stump speeches against her will, or to march a fainting sisterhood to the polls under a police, in Bloomer costume. Women who condemn their sisters for discontent with the laws as they are, have their prototype in those men of America who, in our revolutionary struggle with England, vehemently denounced and stigmatized ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... by Congress for erection of a building and treatment of poor patients at the expense of the District was valid despite the fact that the members of the Corporation belonged to a monastic order or sisterhood of a particular church.[35] It has also sustained a contract made at the request of Indians to whom money was due as a matter of right, under a treaty, for the payment of such money by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... the heart that they judge us. "Only a pal," they will say, towering strong and protecting; and the woman feels uplifted, even though in the same breath they have honestly agreed with her, after careful scrutiny, that it is not her fault that she was born into the plain sisterhood. Bushmen will risk their lives for a woman pal or otherwise but leave her to pick ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... bootless bene?" What he did was to endow the church with this admirable piece of head-gear. And when any woman in the parish was unanimously adjudged to be deserving of the honor, the bridle was put on her head and tongue, and she was led about town by the beadle as an example to all the scolding sisterhood. Truly, if it could only be applied to the women and men who repeat gossip, rumors reports, on dits, small slanders, proved or unproved, to all gobe-mouches, club-gabblers, tea-talkers and tattlers, chatterers, church-twaddlers, ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... and smaller behind—bound for 'Frisco. What ho! the merry "windjammer" with her stowed sails and smell of tar awakened within me old memories, hungry and grimy for the most part. But this was no independent, self-respecting member of the Wind-wafted sisterhood. Far out in the offing lay a steamer of the same line that was to TOW the Meteor to the Golden Gate! How is the breed of sailors fallen! The few laborers aboard would take an occasional wheel, pick oakum, and yarn their unadventurous yarns. ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... in much more real danger herself, as came to the bride's mind presently, when, in the midst of her lamentations, she exclaimed, 'And, ah, Clairette! there ends his goodly promise about the sisterhood ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... courtesy. Oh, she keeps her secret well! But I came upon her in the woods alone, last Friday, fresh, no doubt, from her lover's arms; tremulous, smiling, yet tearful, with face dyed rose. And when to my last effort to attain the right of sisterhood she would only stammer the tell-tale words: she had promised! and press her hot cheeks against mine, I thrust her from me, indignant, and from my affections for ever. Yet I hold her in my power, I could write to Tanty, put ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... undergoing the greatest disappointment at this moment. I was to be sent to Montenegro to establish a Red Cross sisterhood and overhaul the hospital, and to be given five sisters to take with me I as the head—so interesting—and in the part of the world which has always attracted me to the utmost, ever since I was in Sofia. And after it was all arranged and I was simply reveling ...
— Nelka - Mrs. Helen de Smirnoff Moukhanoff, 1878-1963, a Biographical Sketch • Michael Moukhanoff
... threw discredit on the mummery and the mummers. Still the passion existed; and in no case was it more observable than in that of the celebrated witch-finder. An actual presence at the demoniacal rites of the broom-riding sisterhood would have been attended with much danger and considerable difficulty; indeed, it has been asserted that the visitors, like those at Almack's, were expected to be balloted for, ticketed, and dressed in a manner ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... polity the Waldensean Church differs slightly from our Congregational sisterhood. The local church is independent in the direction of its affairs. They have a "Board of Evangelization" which has supervision of their churches. Dr. Tron, a member of this board and president of the American ...
— The American Missionary — Vol. 48, No. 10, October, 1894 • Various
... was engaged, and now Anna's prophecy had come to pass, and she was remaining for the sake of her unpaid wages. She was a young girl, and pretty for one of her sisterhood, who perpetuate, as a rule, the hard and strenuous lineaments and forms held to hard labor, until they have attained a squat solidity of ungraceful muscle. This little Hungarian Marie was still not overdeveloped muscularly, although one saw her hands ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... not all sorrow and weakness even then, do not reach it till much later. If Shakespeare had dared he would have described with poetic fire the age of the girl who never marries. But this is a digression. The point is that the truth about marriage is out, since the modern spinster has shown the sisterhood how to live, and an amazing number of women look upon wedlock as a foolish thing, vainly imagined, ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... met during his week in Nome. He would have given his life if a few million people in the States could have known these women. Something would have happened then, and the sisterhood of half a continent—possessing the power of the ballot—would have opened their arms to them. Men like John Graham would have gone out of existence; Alaska would have received her birthright. For these women were of the kind who greeted ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... them Allans." Her father and mother both died soon after Mary showed signs of persisting—her ten brothers and sisters had refused to live, and when Mary was left to her fate Sister Angela rescued her, and the girl had been trained for entrance into a Sisterhood later on. ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... they were not always righteously allied; but, as all know, the prohibition question holds a prominent place in the history of this proud young queen, with her "ad astra per aspera," and from the time she was admitted to a place among the sisterhood of States, up to the date that the comparatively little majority of 8,000 votes placed her squarely in opposition to the saloon, with all its interests and iniquities, he labored, watched, and prayed, ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... towering high, E'en as the heart in which they are enshrined: A bright assembly on that day combined Each other in his honour to outvie, When 'mid the fair his judgment did descry That sweet perfection all to her resign'd. Unmindful of her rival sisterhood, He motion'd silently his preference, And fondly welcomed her, that humblest one: So pure a kiss he gave, that all who stood, Though fair, rejoiced in beauty's recompense: By that strange act nay heart ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... tenderness set playing on her lips, Whilst round her gracious presence for a robe Shall float the vesture of pure modesty; A woman, she, save in the fallen soul, A spotless angel framed, but spiritless; This being shall I mould, and with my love Animate to ideal consciousness, Then let her sisterhood pass humbled on, Unheeded in the depth of ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... character and principle inherent in the weaker sex was any thing but high; nearly, indeed, identical with that formed by the learned lady who, to the question, "Did she think the virtue of any single one of her sisterhood impregnable?" replied "C'est selon." He often used to astonish my weak mind by his observations on this head. I did not know till afterward that Sir Henry Fallowfield, the Bassompierre of his day, came for the Christmas pheasant-shooting ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... designation of a family of some distinction in the county of Tyrone. I was the younger of two daughters, and we were the only children. There was a difference in our ages of nearly six years, so that I did not, in my childhood, enjoy that close companionship which sisterhood, in other circumstances, necessarily involves; and while I was still a child, my sister was married. The person upon whom she bestowed her hand, was a Mr. Carew, a gentleman of property and consideration in the north of England. I remember well the eventful ...
— Two Ghostly Mysteries - A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family; and The Murdered Cousin • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... sisterhoods were all celibate, Jeff, and under vows of obedience. These are just women, and mothers, and where there's motherhood you don't find sisterhood—not much." ...
— Herland • Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman
... to employ "evangelists" to hold "revival meetings" of a new order; but when the people appeared to be thoughtful, and they got them into the "anxious meetings," they found it almost impossible to get them to praying or the church to praying for them directly and earnestly, especially the sisterhood of the Presbyterian church; so the deacons and elders, in their strait, begged Mrs. Arnold to "come over into Macedonia and help." Much as she had suffered in her early religious life from predestinarianism, she never was a bigot, and so she, like Paul, "gathered assuredly" that the ...
— Elizabeth: The Disinherited Daugheter • E. Ben Ez-er
... 'wounded vanity.' She hinted that if I did not make an effort to quell my 'ungodly discontent,' to cease 'murmuring against God's appointment,' and to cultivate the profound humility befitting my station, my mind would very likely 'go to pieces' on the rock that wrecked most of my sisterhood—morbid self-esteem—and that I should die an ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... Luisa of Hessen-Darmstadt the happy woman. By means of whom there was duly realized a Friedrich Wilhelm, who became "King Friedrich Wilhelm III." (a much-enduring, excellent, though inarticulate man), as well as various other Princes and Princesses, in spite of interruptions from the Lichtenau Sisterhood. High-souled Elizabeth was relegated to Stettin; her amount of Pension is not mentioned; her Family, after the unhappy proofs communicated to them, had given their consent and sanction;—and she stayed there, idle, or her own mistress ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... away from the busy world of her earlier youth, leaving the wrack of hopes behind, she had drifted on the chartless current of fate into this Umilta Sisterhood, this latter day Beguinage; where, provided with work that would furnish her daily bread, she could hide her proud head without a sense of shame. Doctor Grantlin, in compliance with her request, would keep the secret of her retreat; and surely here ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... with her compassion or her love, the principal object of the dramatic interest: here, again, probably, his chief object was by expressing, in majestic choral songs, the complaints, the wishes, the cares, and supplications of the whole sisterhood, to exhibit a kind of social solemnity ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... civilization, in all its forms of intelligence, enterprise, wealth, and improvement. Contiguous States, with separate jurisdictions, admitted a divergence of customs, laws, and institutions, remarkable in its character, and fraught with momentous consequences to the whole sisterhood. Nothing like this could have occurred under the consolidated form. It is true, according to the principles we have heretofore enounced as having been established by universal history and experience, slavery must have disappeared eventually, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... to Nancy and the Department of the Meurthe et Moselle not long after I had this conversation in Reims. The Mother Superior of the great Sisterhood of Christian Doctrine at Nancy confirmed this amazing story of the performances at Domremy, and gave me many particulars of the petty persecutions to which the Sisters who conduct schools all over France are subjected. The schools are open at all hours to the invasion of Inspectors, who magnify ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... being mixed up with this old Miss Cronin and Beryl Van Tuyn in a sort of horrible sisterhood of victims of this vile man's fascination. Her flesh crept at the indignity of it, and all her patrician pride revolted at being remembered among his probably innumerable conquests. At that moment she felt punished for having so often ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... when the day of his release from captivity was nigh, and he was dwelling in the house of the Sisters at Almelo, he fell sick; and having fulfilled seventy years of life, he fell asleep in the Lord and was buried in the chapel of the Sisterhood there. After his happy departure, John of Resa, a devout priest, was chosen as the second minister of the House of St. John, and he sought and obtained for that House certain privileges that were needful, and ...
— The Chronicle of the Canons Regular of Mount St. Agnes • Thomas a Kempis
... believed was the real truth, what prayers could be agonizing enough, what tenderness could be deep enough, for this poor, lost, blighted, hapless, blameless child of misfortune, struck by such a doom as perhaps no living creature in all the sisterhood of ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... a form should be a vessel of perdition. Repent, my daughter—confess thy witchcrafts—turn thee from thine evil faith—embrace this holy emblem, and all shall yet be well with thee here and hereafter. In some sisterhood of the strictest order, shalt thou have time for prayer and fitting penance, and that repentance not to be repented of. This do and live—what has the law of Moses done for thee that thou shouldest ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... Greek and national, she started in Arcis a secular girl's-school, and as soon as a little quiet was restored to the minds of the community, pupils flocked in from all quarters. Under the Empire Mother Marie-des-Anges was able to reconstitute her Ursuline sisterhood, and the first act of her restored authority was a recognition of gratitude. She decreed that on every year on the 5th of April, the anniversary of Danton's death, a service should be held in the chapel of the convent for the repose of his soul. ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... dead and that his wife has ceased to survive him; now, too, that Miss Ambient, whom I also saw at intervals during the time that followed, has, with her embroideries and her attitudes, her necromantic glances and strange intuitions, retired to a Sisterhood, where, as I am told, she is deeply immured and quite ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... lyrics. In spirit and in form they are singular and remarkable. We cannot think of any poems which more show the mystic enchantment of genius. How else was a ragged sempstress in a squalid garret made immortal, nay, made universal, made to stand for an entire sisterhood of wretchedness? Here is the direst poverty, blear-eyed sorrow, dim and dismal suffering,—nothing of the romantic. A stern picture it is, which even the softer touches render sterner; still there is nought in it that revolts or shocks; ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... men, and should lose my social standing if I let my voice be heard.' Oh my wife, our land, our goodly land, which we had hoped would be free and strong among the peoples of earth, is rotten and honeycombed with the tyranny of gold! We who had hoped to stand first in the Anglo-Saxon sisterhood for justice and freedom, are not even fit to stand last. Do I not know only too bitterly how weak is my voice; and that that which I can do is as nothing: but shall I remain silent? Shall the glow-worm refuse to give its light, because it is not a star set up on high; shall the broken stick refuse ...
— Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland • Olive Schreiner
... the radiant sisterhood of queenly graces! She can not be crushed to earth. The eternal years of God being hers, she, no more than her author, can go down. Error may fling widely open his arsenal gates of defilement and deceit, ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... here in Willow Springs are like and what I would have been like had I stayed here," she thought. She felt relieved and almost happy. She had come home at a crisis of her own life hoping to be able to talk a little with her mother, or if talk proved impossible hoping to get some sense of sisterhood by being in her presence. She had thought there was something buried away, deep within every woman, that at a certain call would run out to other women. Now she felt that the hope, the dream, the desire she had cherished was altogether futile. Sitting in the ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... yawning, they rested their unlovely stomachs on discolored sofa-cushions on the window-sills and waited for something to appear. Two blocks away they were—yet to Ruth they seemed to be in the room with her, claiming her as one of their sisterhood. For now she was a useless woman, as they were. She raged with the thought that she might grow to be like them in every respect—she, Ruth Winslow!... She wondered if any of them were Norwegians named Ericson.... ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... the old Italian larvae and most of the sisterhood, display extraordinary affection for the blood of new-born unbaptized infants; and it is a great desideratum to kill them before the preventive rite has been irrevocably administered; for the bodies of unbaptized children were almost ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... bathing-house, would have inherited the crown of Egypt, and as she had no child of her own, this adopted child would have come to coronation. Had there been no Miriam there would have been no Moses. What a garland for faithful sisterhood! ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... had been strangely prophetical—"Trouble may come to me one day;" it had come already, in its most crushing form. The bond of sisterhood is very strong; it has peculiar and precious privileges, apart from other relationships; a sort of twinship of sympathy unites many sisters who have grown up together. Their thoughts and interests are seldom apart. All their little pleasures, their minor griefs, youthful ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... that we women should begin to teach and to think thus. It is meet that we—maidens, wives, mothers, to whom the lines have fallen in more pleasant places—should turn and look on that pale sisterhood—some carrying meekly to the grave their heavy unuttered secret, some living unto old age, to bear the world's smile of pity, even of derision, over an "unfortunate attachment." Others, perhaps, furnishing a text whereupon prudent mothers may lesson romantic ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... The latter, Mr. Hervey tells us, paid a visit to London, and there, at one of her performances, gold and bank-notes were showered upon the stage, to the amount of L800. Her annual salary at the French opera was less than L150. The suppers of Mademoiselle Guimard, another of the fairy-footed sisterhood, whose bust, bequeathed by her to the opera, is still the principal ornament of the dancers' green-room, were renowned throughout Europe. They occurred thrice in the week; the first was attended by the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... one class among the writers of the day sacred from the attacks of Edgar Poe's pen. Before almost everything else The Dreamer was chivalrous. The "starry sisterhood of poetesses" and authoresses, therefore, escaped his criticisms. One of his contemporaries said of him that he sometimes mistook his vial of prussic acid for his ink-pot. In writing of authors of the gentle sex, his ink-pot became a ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... to the days that are gone, and wonder if indeed we were so merry and gay. The silence of the grave reigns here now. The laughter, the music—all the merry sounds of a happy household—have fled forever. A convent of ascetic nuns could not be stiller, nor the holy sisterhood more grave and sombre. Let me begin at the beginning, and relate events as ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... the couch, with her hands lying by her sides, as if she cared for nothing in this world or out of it. But when Jane entered, she started and sat up, and tried to look like herself. Her face, however, was so pitiful, that honest-hearted Jane could not help crying, upon which the responsive sisterhood overcame the proud lady, and she cried too. Jane had all but forgotten the letter, of the import of which she had no idea, for her father had taken care to rouse no suspicions in her mind. But when ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... town outside we made many other acquaintances, of all classes of society. In 1849 no social stigma, or very little, attached to any open association. Gamblers were respectable citizens, provided they ran straight games. The fair and frail sisterhood was well represented. It was nothing against a man, either in the public eye or actually, to be seen talking, walking, or riding with one of these ladies; for every one knew them. There were now a good many decent women in town, ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... you Nuns no farther priuiledges? Nun. Are not these large enough? Isa. Yes truely; I speake not as desiring more, But rather wishing a more strict restraint Vpon the Sisterhood, the Votarists of ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... "The Sisterhood that was so sweet, The Starry System sphered complete, Which the mazed Orient used to greet, The Four-and-Thirty fallen Stars glimmer ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... Left orphans as children, the two had grown up greatly attached to one another naturally, and being the sole survivors of a very rich family and inheriting all its savings and residues, they had an extremely good time of it together without any great desire to exchange their happy brother and sisterhood for the bonds of matrimony. Still they were very young, being ...
— A Queen's Error • Henry Curties
... Noble, and Little, and the Plymouth Church, which, from the day of its organization, with its testimony and its offerings, has stood by this Association, and all the other churches of this vicinage, grown now to be such a comely sisterhood, which have shared with these others in the support of ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 12, December, 1889 • Various
... England, when her education was completed and the good nuns wrote to me, as her father's executor, to say the time had arrived for taking her away from the convent unless she wished to change her religion and join the sisterhood, to both of which courses I was, of course, bitterly opposed, and, as you may imagine, was delighted when Elsie herself requested to ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson
... Anne had some thoughts of telling Elizabeth what Helen's feelings really were, in hopes that she might shew a little regard for them; but, sisterless herself, she thought the bond of sisterhood too sacred to be rashly interfered with by a stranger's hand; besides, she considered Helen's complaints as really confidential, if not expressly so, and resolved to mention them to no one but Lady Merton, and to limit her attempts at being useful to bringing the two sisters before each ...
— Abbeychurch - or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... home on earth desolate. Don Giovanni, Don Ippolito, and Don Francesco dello Schiano recited the prayers of the Church over the corpse; and though deeply affected themselves, strove to console the bereaved sisterhood, chiefly by extolling the rare merits and the heroic virtues of their departed mother. Almighty God vouchsafed, even during the first night of their loving watch, to give them a proof of that sanctity which was so soon to be triumphantly demonstrated. Sister Margaret, of ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... our own country, must we overlook the Historical division, the perfecting of which has been a labor of love with Mr. Etting. He allots space among the old Thirteen, and reserves a place at the feast of reunion to the mother of that rebellious sisterhood. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... for a moment. "And what on earth," he said, "do you think the world is made of? Why do you think I have been doing things for you? The abstract pleasure of goodness? Are you one of the members of that great white sisterhood that takes and does not give? The good accepting woman! Do you really suppose a girl is entitled to live at free quarters on any man she meets without giving ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... had given them such particular directions, that they were not long in finding them out. They proved to be very different persons from Nightmare, Shakejoint, and Scarecrow; for, instead of being old, they were young and beautiful; and instead of one eye amongst the sisterhood, each Nymph had two exceedingly bright eyes of her own, with which she looked very kindly at Perseus. They seemed to be acquainted with Quicksilver; and when he told them the adventure which Perseus had undertaken, they made no difficulty about giving him the valuable articles ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... the cry of the oppressed goes up from Greek against Greek, it was the voice of Athens which should first remind the oppressor that Hellene differed from barbarian in postponing the use of force to the persuasions of equal law. Wherever a barbarian hand offered wrong to any city of the Hellenic sisterhood, it was the arm of Athens which should first be stretched forth in the holy strength of Apollo the Averter. Wherever among her own children the ancient loyalty was yielding to love of pleasure or of base gain, there, above all, it was the duty of Athens to ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... you are so inconsistent, that you are Constant in nothing, but Inconstancy—— So good Natur'd, so techy, so wise— and sometimes so otherwise— In Short, so much every thing, that were the whole Sisterhood of the imitative Arts in emulous Association joyn'd, with the Genius of your own Great Shakespear at their Head, Directing their different Powers, and wing his own boundless Imagination into Satyr and Panegirick for the Purpose— They could not be too Severe upon Your Vices— nor ...
— The Covent Garden Theatre, or Pasquin Turn'd Drawcansir • Charles Macklin
... one another with consternation in their faces. If some one wasn't playing a joke there must be a thief in camp! That one of the Winnebagos should be taking the other girls' things was inconceivable. They were bound to each other by bonds stronger than sisterhood; they knew each other's very thoughts, almost, and to suspect one of their number of stealing hurt worse than a blow; and yet here were their things disappearing almost under their hands! No, the thing was impossible. What would ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey
... in the service of master tailors and close-fisted contractors, until now it is almost time for each to hem the borders of her own shroud. Consumption points their place in the procession. With their sad sisterhood are intermingled many youthful maidens who have sickened in aristocratic mansions, and for whose aid science has unavailingly searched its volumes, and whom breathless love has watched. In our ranks the rich maiden and the poor ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... evince, and which would be proved by the frequency of her self-flagellations, the severity with which the scourge was applied, and the anxiety which she might express to become a member of the holy sisterhood. When the term of penitence should arrive, the maiden would be removed to the department of the convent inhabited by the professed nuns; and then her flowing hair would be cut short, and she would enter on her novitiate previously to taking ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... of finance, manufactures, education and information, distributed all over the republic so as to become acquainted with the people in general, by so doing wiping out sectional feeling and realizing that God was their father and that they all belonged to a common brother- and sisterhood united together under a government for the people, of the people, and by the people. I paid a visit to the navy yard and inspected two battleships that were undergoing some ...
— Eurasia • Christopher Evans
... itself did not appear to her to be entirely exempt. After delivering these lectures in Benham she intended to repeat them in various parts of the State, and in some of the large cities elsewhere, under the auspices of the Confederated Sisterhood of Women's Clubs of America, the Sorosis which Mrs. Earle had established on a firm basis, and of which at present she was second vice-president. As a token of sympathy with this undertaking, Mr. Lyons offered to procure ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... from the priesthood at Thebes were several women of high rank, who served in the worship of this God, and among them was Katuti, who by the particular desire of the Regent had lately been admitted to this noble sisterhood. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the Ursulines advanced, followed by all her nuns. Her white veil was raised; in order that the people might see the features of the possessed ones, it had been ordered that it should be thus with her and six of the sisterhood. Her attire had no distinguishing feature, except a large rosary extending from her neck nearly to her feet, from which hung a gold cross; but the dazzling pallor of her face, rendered still more conspicuous by the dark ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... thereby won for himself a look of withering scorn from the hag aforesaid, and glances of stupid wonder—in which in some cases could be also detected faint traces of an expression of gratitude—from the unfortunate sisterhood who laboured ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... though an Hungarian, was not inferior, in point of effrontery, to any one of the sisterhood in England, no sooner heard this menace, than she affected an air of affronted innocence, thanked God she had lived in many reputable families, and been trusted with untold gold, but was never before suspected of theft; that the other maid might do as she should ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... behold! there, sure enough, was a piece of desiccated flesh, with marks of coagulated blood; nothing more or less than the lost prepuce—long lost, but now found. It was placed in charge of the Ursuline Sisterhood, where it has remained ever since undisturbed, except by a controversy in regard to the propriety of the relic, in which the good bishop ambled about in the most ambiguous manner, the only clearly defined portion of ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... ancient time," says Carlyle,[24] "when man was in his childhood, when the universe within was divided by no wall of adamant from the universe without, and the forms of the Spirit mingled and dwelt in trustful sisterhood with the forms of the Sense, was not easy to seize and adapt with any fitness of application to the feelings of modern minds. It was to penetrate into the inmost shrines of Imagination, where human passion and action are reflected in dim and fitful, but deeply significant resemblances, and to copy ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... Mary Quince. No, not that,' I said, rejecting the thrifty sixpence she tendered, for I had heard that the revelations of this weird sisterhood were bright in proportion to the kindness of their clients, and was resolved to approach Bartram with cheerful auguries. 'That five-shilling piece,' I insisted; and honest Mary ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... the marriage, not only from their hatred to Austria, but because it had accomplished the ambition of an obnoxious favourite to give a wife to the Dauphin of their kingdom. On the credulous and timid mind of the Prince, then in the leading strings of this pious sisterhood, they impressed the misfortunes to his country and to the interest of the Bourbon family, which must spring from the Austrian influence through the medium of his bride. No means were left unessayed to steel him against her sway. ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... 1756. Soeur Marie Madelaine, Fondatrice et premiere Superieure Generale de l'Institut des Ecoles Chretiennes de la Misericorde, morte en odeur de Saintete 16 Juillet 1846, a l'Abbaye de St. Sauveur-le-Vicomte." The badge of the sisterhood is a cross inscribed with their motto "L'obeissance jusqu'a la mort." Some of the party made an attempt at fishing in the little river Douve, but without success, though rewarded for their walk by a pretty view of the apse of the Abbey church, with its delicately-sculptured ...
— Brittany & Its Byways • Fanny Bury Palliser
... Finch bore very little likeness to her noisy sisterhood of fashion. In an age when it was the height of ill-breeding for a wife to admit a partiality for her husband, Ardelia was not ashamed to confess that Daphnis—for so she styled the excellent Heneage Finch—absorbed every corner of her mind that ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... make me think myself a god," says Jurgen. "Madame Guenevere, when man recognized himself to be Heaven's vicar upon earth, it was to serve and to glorify and to protect you and your radiant sisterhood that man consecrated his existence. You were beautiful, and you were frail; you were half goddess and half bric-a-brac. Ohime, I recognize the call of chivalry, and my heart-strings resound: yet, for innumerable reasons, I hesitate to take you for my wife, and to concede myself your appointed protector, ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... indeed a daughter of Shakespeare's, is the eldest born of that group to which Lady Macbeth and Dionyza belong by right of weird sisterhood. The wives of the thane of Glamis and the governor of Tharsus, it need hardly be said, are both of them creations of a much later date—if not of the very latest discernible or definable stage in the art of Shakespeare. Deeply dyed as she is in bloodguiltiness, the wife of Arden ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Guide therefore just describes the members of our sisterhood who besides being handy and ready for any kind of duty are also a jolly happy family and likely to be good, cheery ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... true, in this School, a definite curriculum of studies, and that curriculum you have honorably completed. You have just been received by public acknowledgment into the community of educated women. But you will be false to the honorable sisterhood, false, I am sure, to all the teachings you have received here, if you entertain for a moment the thought that no further intellectual acquisitions are before you. The branches which you have learned thus far are chiefly valuable to you for the power they ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... to listen. She inherited her mother's placid, Madonna-like beauty, and was at this time the fairest of the whole sisterhood. Sarah, who was hereafter to be considered not only the wit but also the beauty of the family, was at this time a child of ten, and not yet grown into her full inheritance of comeliness. In after years it was said of Sarah that she was 'not only beautiful and lovely to a high degree, ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... born. The Savant went on living, but he couldn't love his daughter properly, as she'd been the cause of her mother's death. Besides, he wasn't the kind of man to understand children, so when Madeleine was nine or ten, he sent her to a school—a very queer school. It was kept by a Sisterhood; not nuns exactly, because they were Protestants, but almost as good or as bad; and an elderly female cousin of the Savant's was the ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... termed, the Punn. It would not be much amiss to consult Dr. T—W—[2] (who is certainly a very able Projector, and whose system of Divinity and spiritual Mechanicks obtains very much among the better Part of our Under-Graduates) whether a general Intermarriage, enjoyned by Parliament, between this Sisterhood of the Olive Beauties, and the Fraternity of the People call'd Quakers, would not be a very serviceable Expedient, and abate that Overflow of Light which shines within them so powerfully, that it dazzles ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... time, several of my acquaintances among the sisterhood, who had soon got wind of my misfortune, flocked to insult me with their malicious consolations. Most of them had long envied me the affluence and splendour I had been maintained in; and though there was scarce one of ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... Walker's fleet was wrecked long ago," sigh the nuns of Quebec. If they had {264} prayed half as hard that their corrupt rulers, their Bigots and their kings and their painted women whose nod could set Europe on fire with war,—if the holy sisterhood had prayed for this gang of vampires whose vices had brought doom to the land, to be swallowed in some abyss, their prayers might have been more effective ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... who acted as portress showed themselves at the aperture. In a voice rendered unusually shrill and querulous by vexation at having her rest broken, she demanded who it was thus disturbing the slumbers of the sisterhood. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... these crowded thousands, crushed in putrid masses, clinging to the filthy prison bars, that they aroused compassion in that strange and ancient guild that once had claimed the Magdalen in its sad sisterhood, and these aided them with food, year ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... garden; of rows of berry bushes; of a grove of young fig-trees; of rows of the sword-bundles of pineapple tops. Everything except the old-fashioned flower-bed, with its border of mignonette, and the generous beds of roses and other flowers of the bountiful sisterhood of petals of artificial cultivation, spoke of utility which must make the ground pay ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... and fountains, and all the beauty within, while they had no homes worthy the name, and alas! no flowers or fountains to gladden their beauty hungered hearts. My friends used to smile at my saddened face as I looked in these other human faces with a pitying sense of sisterhood, that was strange to them; but they humored my desire to try and gladden these lives so limited in their happy allotments, by gifts of rare flowers and choice fruits. But I used to find the old-fashioned flowers, that the gardeners ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... building, standing in pretty grounds, on which a very useful institution for boarding and training native and half-white girls, and the reception of white girls as day scholars, also stands. This is in connection with Miss Sellon's Sisterhood at Devonport. Another building, alongside the cathedral, is used for English service in Hawaiian. There are two Congregational churches: the old "Bethel," of which the Rev. S. C. Damon, known to all strangers, and one of the oldest and most respected Honolulu residents, is the minister; ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... terrible trick of defying her enemies by standing erect, chin up, hand on hip, and right foot advanced, patting the floor. It was impossible, even in the orchestra seats, to look at her in this attitude and not shrink before her; and on the stage she visibly tyrannized over the invalid sisterhood with her full-blown fascinations. These unhappy girls personated, with a pathetic effect not to be described, such arch and fantastic creations of the poet's mind as Bewitchingcreature and Exquisitelittlepet, and the play was a kind of fairy burlesque in rhyme, ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... sisterhood confined now to France and Germany, who, without taking any monastic vow, devote themselves to works of piety ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... which would be dangerous to their eggs. Next, they deliberate on the plan of their future camp, after which they lay out distinctly a regular parallelogram, offering room enough for the brother and sisterhood, somewhere from one to five acres. One side of the place is bounded by the sea, and is always left open for entrance and exit; the other three sides are inclosed with a wall of stones ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... admiration of her beauty she was not ill pleased to humour at this small cost of having him climb into her little parlour and gossip of summer nights? With her decent and sombre dress, her simple gravity, and that fine piece of priestly needlework, she looked like some pious lay-member of a sisterhood, living by special permission outside her convent walls. Or was she maintained here aloft by her friend in comfortable leisure, so that he might have before him the perfect, eternal type, uncorrupted and untarnished by the struggle for existence? ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... was the lady called, always wore the costume of a religious house when she visited Andrea, but whether this were merely assumed for convenience, or whether she were actually one of the holy sisterhood, I had then neither the desire, nor the means of ascertaining; I only know, that she used sometimes to call me her "dear child," and seemed to vie in affection for me, with the cavalier. Serventius,—yes—the noble gentleman bore my name, for which I liked him all the better, used occasionally ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 530, January 21, 1832 • Various
... not be amiss to mention, for the benefit of such of my readers as are unacquainted with her now forgotten celebrity, that she was a phenomenon in the mesmeric line; one of the earliest that had indicated the birth of a new science, or the revival of an old humbug. Since those times her sisterhood have grown too numerous to attract much individual notice; nor, in fact, has any one of them come before the public under such skilfully contrived circumstances of stage effect as those which at once mystified ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... in diffidence, or humility, from religious talk. I know it was from no lack of deep spiritual conviction. If ever the world contained a purer, sweeter sisterhood, I have not known it. Their work was homely, as their lives were secluded, but no one ever saw them idle or impatient. In one straight and narrow path they walked through ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... confused and shattered tabernacles which they left behind them are not nearly so corrupt and dead as the monastic system which still cumbers the earth. People are building on the site of the old convent a hospital for indigent and decrepit women, where a religious sisterhood will have care of the inmates. It is a good end enough, but I think it would be the true compensation if all the rubbish of the old cloister were cleared from the area of those walls, and a great garden ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... the mead through which we were passing was a natural parterre, where in the midst of the lively vernal green, bloomed the oxlip, the white and blue violet, the yellow-cup dotted with jet, and many another fragile and aromatic member of the floral sisterhood. ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... of Farmer A, or Farmer B, was stricken down by fever, and needed a friendly nurse to sit by her bedside all night, though she had herself been toiling hard all day. Every thing philanthropists mean when they talk of brotherhood and sisterhood among men and women was condensed in that homely phrase, "the neighbors." "Oh!" said Webster, ruefully, "if the neighbors think I may be of service, of course I must go";—and, with his three companions, he was soon seated in the stage for Ipswich, where he ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... rude to you, Aunt Jessica! Forgive me!" There was something of the new sense of womanhood in her voice and of the sisterhood in suffering which womanhood alone ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... Church, manifested in so many ways by the people, had led Miss O'Shea to speculate more on the insecurity of landed property in Ireland than all the long list of outrages scheduled at assizes, or all the burning haggards that ever flared in a wintry sky. Her notion was to retire into some religious sisterhood, and away from life and its cares, to pass her remaining years in holy meditation and piety. She would have liked to have sold her estate and endowed some house or convent with the proceeds, but there were certain legal difficulties that stood ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... of an obscuring dust of discussion, floated fragments of condemnation: 'Sexless creatures!' 'The Shrieking Sisterhood!' etc., in which the kindest phrase was Lord John's repeated, 'Touched, you know,' as he tapped his forehead—'not really responsible, poor ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... saddened with thought and worn out with vigils; and are striking examples of the truth, that while each human being can bear his own burden, the burden of the world's mystery and pain crushes us to the earth. The Persian Sibyl, the oldest of the weird sisterhood, to whom the sunset of life had given mystical lore, holds a book close to her eyes, as if from dimness of vision; the Libyan Sibyl lifts a massive volume above her head on to her knees; the Cumaean Sibyl intently reads her book at a distance from her dilated eyes; the Erythraean ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... if you and I were to go on writing without intermission according to my obligation and your courtesy, I should have to neglect the Chapel of S. Catherine here, and be absent at the appointed hours for company with my sisterhood, while you would have to leave the Chapel of S. Paul, and be absent from morning through the day from your sweet usual colloquy with painted forms, the which with their natural accents do not speak to you less clearly ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... nights, or impromptu masquerades, when the school raided the trunks in the attic for costumes. After a few weeks' time, the most spoiled little worldling lost her consciousness of calls outside of "bounds," and surrendered to the spirit of the youthful sisterhood. ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... still remaining apart from that continental sisterhood of grief. All America seemed to be playing Hamlet, debating, deferring, letting ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... had very little chance of learning any surgery, so she felt that she could not do better than pass some time in Paris with the nursing sisterhood of St. Vincent de Paul, which had been established about two hundred years earlier. Here, too, she went with the sisters on their rounds, both in the hospitals and in the homes of the poor, and learnt how best to help the people without turning them into ...
— The Red Book of Heroes • Leonora Blanche Lang
... tale to many a feeling heart; Alas for some abiding-place of love, O'er which my spirit, like the mother dove, Might brood with warming wings! O fair! O kind! 5 Sisters in blood, yet each with each intwined More close by sisterhood of heart and mind! Me disinherited in form and face By nature, and mishap of outward grace; Who, soul and body, through one guiltless fault 10 Waste daily with the poison of sad thought, Me did you soothe, when solace hoped I none! And as on unthaw'd ice the winter sun, Though ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... the black dresses and long white kerchiefs of the Sisters of Charity flitting about, emblems of mercy in a world which might otherwise seem only fit for demons. The place we speak of was Arcis-sur-Aube. Napoleon, who looked on the system of this sisterhood 'as one of the most sublime conceptions of the human mind,' was then in the act of falling back with 30,000 men, after having been attacked the evening before (March 19, 1814) by 130,000 Austrians. He was within three weeks of the prostration of his power, and he must ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 420, New Series, Jan. 17, 1852 • Various
... a very retired life in Schillingsfurst, receives but few visits and pays only a few, and occupies himself principally in building and arranging a large schoolhouse and an institution for girls under the superintendence of a Benedictine Sisterhood. ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... queer sort of prayer to Mag Henderson. But strong hands held hers close, a strong heart pounded courage into hers; and who shall say that the helpless tears on Kate Kildare's face were of no help to a girl who had known nothing in all her life of the sisterhood of women? ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... quality or circumstance that should bring together people the most unlike in all other respects, and make a brotherhood and sisterhood of them,—the rich and the proud finding themselves in the same category with the ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... better off when friendless. But she began to be sorry for the type. Instead of shrinking from Gertie in the presence of the discerning compatriots, as she was at first inclined to do, she made it a point to be seen with her, championing the sisterhood of loneliness. There were moments when this association might not have been discreet; but they were also moments in which—so it seemed to Edith—discretion was not a part of valor. Once or twice she accompanied ...
— The Letter of the Contract • Basil King
... Louisa eventually go out as a governess, do not be uneasy respecting her lot. The sketch you give of her character leads me to think she has a better chance of happiness than one in a hundred of her sisterhood. Of pleasing exterior (that is always an advantage—children like it), good sense, obliging disposition, cheerful, healthy, possessing a good average capacity, but no prominent master talent to make her ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... Was it the ghost of Madame Richard who stood there pale, cold, and in the sombre garb of her sisterhood? ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... to the court of Naples? why did a mother ever consent to trust her daughter out of her sight! but forsooth she must be left behind in a convent, where soon afterwards an epidemic complaint attacks the sisterhood, and Josepha, abandoned to the care of strangers, sinks into an untimely grave, the victim of ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... them out with his hands as he stood up on the saddle of his horse. We rode into Florence as dawn broke, and the sun was an angry red; while we rode his arm was around me and my head upon his shoulder. He spoke in my ear and his voice trembled for love of me. We had thrown away the raiment of the sisterhood to which I had belonged, and as I lay across the saddle I was wrapped in a cloak as crimson as ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... platform-speaking than Englishwomen do, though many of them study public affairs—about which, to say truth, they have much to learn. Observers outside the Colony need not suppose that New Zealand women are in the least degree either "wild," or "new," or belong to any shrieking sisterhood. Though one or two have entered learned professions, most of them are engaged in domestic duties. Those who go out into the world do so to work unassumingly as school teachers, factory hands, or household servants. As school teachers ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... towards the inn in the utmost confusion. At length an archer of the civic guard, wearing his bandolier, and carrying a carbine on his shoulder, appeared at the gate; so, beckoning him towards me, I begged to know the cause of the uproar. "Nothing, sir," said he, "but a dozen of the frail sisterhood, that I and my comrades are conducting to Havre-de-Grace, whence we are to ship them for America. There are one or two of them pretty enough; and it is that, apparently, which attracts the curiosity of ...
— Manon Lescaut • Abbe Prevost
... sauce," said Mrs Christian, with a laugh. To say truth, it required very little to arouse her merriment, or that of her amiable sisterhood. ...
— The Lonely Island - The Refuge of the Mutineers • R.M. Ballantyne
... ever took the veil of our sisterhood, was only fourteen years of age, and considered very pious. She lived but a short time. I was told that she was ill-treated by the priests, and believe her death ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk
... expressing his regret that he had not his French and English dictionary with him. Scarcely had he pronounced the word dictionary, when the lady, by a most astonishing display, which in England would have disgraced the lowest of the frail sisterhood, exclaimed, "Behold the Dictionnaire Universel, which has been opened by the learned of all nations."{39} Dr. E—, on his return from France, related this anecdote in the common room at ————-, and the Dictionnaire universel has ever since ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... his betrothed, Lilias, being in danger at home, had been bestowed in the household of the Countess of Warwick, where she had been much with an admirable and saintly foreign lady, Esclairmonde de Luxembourg, who had taken refuge from the dissensions of her own vexed country among the charitable sisterhood of St. Katharine in the ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... she had determined to erect and endow a convent. The sisterhood, appointed by her and entirely dependent upon her liberality, would treat her with the deference due to a queen. The king had lavished such enormous sums upon her that she had large wealth at her disposal. She had already ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... worship may be managed by the sisterhood of the churches, being congregated together in the absence of their men: of what signification is it that man is made head of the woman as well in worship as in nature? (1 Cor 11:3,7). Yea more, why are the elders of the churches called watchmen, overseers, guides, teachers, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... 1515, an attempt was made by the superior, Isabel of Bourbon, to curtail the indulgences of the sisterhood, by keeping them more closely confined, increasing the number of fast-days, and generally introducing a system of greater rigor. But the nuns remonstrated against the innovation, and had recourse to the Bishop of Bayeux, alledging ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... mistake me for a Nero. The claims of a certain degree of blood-relationship I not only admit, but welcome as a sacred joy. Their experience is unhappy for whom the bonds of parentage, of sisterhood and brotherhood, will not always have a sort of involuntary religion. If a man should not exactly be tied to his mother's apron-string, he should all his life remain tied to her by that other mysterious cord which no knife can sever. Uncles and aunts may, under certain circumstances, be ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... will call each other sister, for our relation is certainly a kind of sisterhood. We are, like sisters, not connected directly, but indirectly, though our relation to our common individuality, as if we were fruit borne by the same tree in different seasons. To be sure," she added regarding her blooming companion with a smile of tender admiration, "we can scarcely be said ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... us who here appear before you, Majestic sisterhood of noble arts, For leave to serve you, Princess, would implore you: Do but command, and we will play our parts. As Theban walls obeyed the lyre's sweet sounding, So here the senseless stone shall live at thine— A world of beauty ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief) |
