"Cloistered" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 'athletico-aesthete'; and warning me, in a fatherly manner, that a rheumatic fever would try my philosophy (as indeed it would), and that my gospel would not do for 'those who are shut out from the exercise of any manly virtue save renunciation.' To those who know that rickety and cloistered spectre, the real R. L. S., the paper, besides being clever in itself, presents rare elements of sport. The critical parts are in particular very bright and neat, and often excellently true. Get it by all manner ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sound, Translated to her soul the great world's voice, And the world-spirit made her heart rejoice. And love was hers,—perennial, intense,— The love that wells from joy and innocence And sanctifies the cloistered heart of youth,— The love of love, of beauty, ...
— Gawayne And The Green Knight - A Fairy Tale • Charlton Miner Lewis
... ignorance, it is not learning itself, but the effect of it; and so pervading and subtle is its influence that it may be traced in the festive halls and gay drawing-rooms of Europe as certainly as in the cloistered library or student's closet; it is, perhaps, the last finish of ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... father, Michel Froment, he could give no distinct lineaments; he pictured him but faintly, vaguely, renowned as an illustrious chemist, bearing the title of Member of the Institute, and leading a cloistered life in the laboratory which he had installed in that secluded, deserted suburb. However he could plainly see his first brother Guillaume, then fourteen years of age, whom some holiday had brought from college that morning, and then and even more vividly his mother, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... beauty will be beauty in any habit; Though, I confess, the splendour of a court Were a much fitter scene for yours, than is A cloistered privacy. ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... is most worth seeing in Pnom-Penh is cloistered within the mysterious walls of vivid pink which surround the Royal Palace. Here is the residence of His Majesty Prea Bat Samdach Prea Sisowath, King of Cambodia; here dwell the twelve score dancing-girls of the famous royal ballet and the hundreds of concubines and attendants ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... Trappists and the Franciscans. But they are cloistered orders which live in shelter from an infamous century. Take, on the other hand, the order of Saint Dominic, which exists for the fashionable world. That is the order which produces jewelled dudes like ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... awaited them if they didn't mend their ways, made them fly to their lucky charms to ward off ill-luck, when she offered them a yellow flower, with great pomp, or some broken glass in a jewel-box. Then she talked to the Three Graces, those big girls who always astonished her with their cloistered existence—Nunkie before everything—and who amused themselves by measuring one another round the biceps, round the chest, or else, with their elbows on the table, played at who should first bend back the other's wrist. Lily sat down for a moment with them, then stopped, ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... curiously round the Quadrangle, with its picturesque irregularity of outline, its towers and turrets and battlements, its grey time-eaten walls, its rows of mullioned heavy-headed windows, and the quiet cloistered air that spoke of study and reflection; and perceiving on one side a row of large windows, with great buttresses between, and a species of steeple on the high-pitched roof, he made bold (just to try the effect) to address Mr. Filcher by the name assigned to him at an early period ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... be remembered, lest I appear to be taking a too eager interest in the girl, that up till now the world of woman had been terra incognita to me; that I had lived a singularly cloistered life, and that first and last I was an idealist. This girl had distinction, mystery and charm, and it is not to be wondered at that I found a joy in her presence. I proved myself a perfect artesian well of conversation, ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... will speak... Do not fear, my friends, your lives are safe. I promise it... What is this? My rooms? How lonely they seem to-night. 'Alone?' Yes, I am always alone. No lover's step has ever echoed through this cloistered silence. Alone and sad. Ah! how I have suffered here... What do they say? It will be over soon, it will be over—soon. One more battle to win. Let me summon all my courage now. I have faced ordeals before. I have forgotten woman's fears, and laid aside ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... enlightenment, or conformed with hygienic laws. Her husband was a feeble creature, whose sole claim to distinction was his inability to speak English. At the time that "The Family," (which is, say, Frederica and Larry) returned, he had become quite blind, and he passed a cloistered existence in a dark corner of his little cottage, sitting, with his hat always upon his head, a being seemingly as withdrawn from the current of life as one of the smoky brown and white china dogs on the ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... all settled pleasantly; and I sat up that evening writing a bit of verse for Lillian, about the Old Cathedral, and "Heaven-aspiring towers," and "Aisles of cloistered shade," and all that sort of thing; which I did not believe or care for; but I thought it would please her, and so it did; and I got golden smiles and compliments for my first, though not my last, insincere poem. I was going fast down hill, in my hurry to rise. However, as I said, ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... cloistered himself, "living in memory," having no companion but the daughter of his wife; trying to console himself by work, recapitulating his life, the story of which he has told in ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... the treatment, whether a panacea or not, is certainly wholesome inasmuch as it inculcates abstinence, exercise, and uncontaminate air. I am not sure, indeed, that the Nature-cure theory does not tend to foster in constitutions less vigorous than Wordsworth's what Milton would call a fugitive and cloistered virtue at a dear expense of manlier qualities. The ancients and our own Elizabethans, ere spiritual megrims had become fashionable, perhaps made more out of life by taking a frank delight in its action and passion and by grappling ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... enormous knowledge of men. From one point of view it is easy to be a saint, and it is easy to be a man of the world; the difficulty is to combine the two qualities, the cunning of the serpent with the innocence of the dove. There is nothing of the naive and guileless innocence of a cloistered virtue in the book, but though the serpent is very cunning his wiliness and craftiness coexist with a simple enthusiasm of humanity which is very marvellous to behold. When we read General Booth's ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker
... truths, thus breathing into all his actions a heavenly influence. He attained in society and in human relationships a degree of perfection not surpassed, if equalled, by the martyr's death, the contemplative of the solitude, the cloistered monk, or ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... Addolorata, afterwards did, though much of it is necessary in explanation of her deeds, which, however they may be regarded, brought upon her and others their inevitable logical consequences. Still less is it meant, in any sense, as an attack upon the conventual system of the cloistered orders, which system was itself a consequence of spiritual, intellectual and political history, and has a prime right to be judged upon the evidence of its causes, and not by the shortcomings of its results in changed ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... the innocent. To believe that the girl herself transcends all lies (for Jacob was not such a fool as to believe implicitly), to wonder enviously at the unanchored life—his own seeming petted and even cloistered in comparison—to have at hand as sovereign specifics for all disorders of the soul Adonais and the plays of Shakespeare; to figure out a comradeship all spirited on her side, protective on his, yet equal on both, for women, thought Jacob, are just the same ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... in that sanctuary seemed fated to go on for ever. Forgotten and unvisited, Eleanora, the druda of Cosimo I., cast off and spurned; the innamorata of Piero de' Medici, wronged and despised; the wife of Carlo de' Panciatichi, divorced and cloistered, lived on and on, far beyond the scriptural limit of threescore years and ten—the pathetic victim ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... death, should enter. That in these dark retreats, secluded from censure, and from the knowledge of the world, they might riot in licentiousness. They were sensible, that women, surrounded with the gay and the amiable, might frequently spurn at the offers of a cloistered priest, but that while confined entirely to their own sex, they would take pleasure in a visit from one of the other, however slovenly and unpolished. In the world at large, should the crimes of the women be detected, the priests have no interest in mitigating their punishment; but ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... retreats, especially with the Carmelites, adopting the hair shirt and submitting to the severest discipline; but now, on coming forth from the most rigid cloistered life, she found herself in the midst of a gay world. This Chapter of Canonesses, which ought to have inculcated the mystic life, was one of those hybrid institutions not altogether white nor quite black, a cross between ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... in that which he enjoined upon them. He desired anxiously that the three children born to him in the East, during his first crusade, John Tristan, Peter, and Blanche, and even Isabel, his eldest daughter, should enter upon the cloistered life, which he looked upon as the safest for their salvation. He exhorted them thereto, especially his daughter Isabel, many and many a time, in letters equally tender and pious; but, as they testified no taste for it, he made no attempt ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... apse, belfry; chapter house; presbytery; anxious-bench, anxious-seat; diaconicum [Lat.], jube^; mourner's bench, mourner's seat. [exterior adjacent to a church] cloisters, churchyard. monastery, priory, abbey, friary, convent, nunnery, cloister. Adj. claustral, cloistered; monastic, monasterial; conventual. Phr. ne vile fano [It]; there's nothing ill can dwell in ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... in all wholesome pleasures, and for tolerance in religious matters. His stern confidence in truth, that she will not be weakened but strengthened by attack, is summarized in the famous sentence, "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue." ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... rehearsing, the place had a sort of brooding quiet, like the ocean just before the arrival of a cyclone. As Lucille had said, Miss Huskisson's voice was loud. It was a powerful organ, and there was no doubt that it would take the cloistered stillness of the Cosmopolis dining-room and stand it on one ear. Almost unconsciously, Archie found himself bracing his muscles and holding his breath as he had done in France at the approach of the zero hour, when awaiting the first roar of a barrage. He listened mechanically ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... who was its skipper must have been much the same as those of a man acting as his own chauffeur and having a breakdown on a holiday in a section of town where the population was as dense as it was curious in the early days of motoring. For months he had been living a cloistered life to keep his friends from knowing what he was doing, as he worked to master the eccentricities of his untried steed, his life and the lives of his crew depending upon this mastery. Now he had stepped from behind the curtain of military secrecy ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... a dried up stick, living the cloistered life of a hard-working woman imprisoned within her daily routine, who had never had a man stick his nose into her room since the death of her husband; yet she had an obsession with double meanings and indecent allusions that were sometimes so far off the mark that only ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... cutting Sir Jasper Nicolls; curtsied to the little Princess Victoria, then staying at the York Hotel, and turned discreetly aside when the Duchess de Berri happened to pass; and (since they were not entirely cloistered) attended, under the watchful eye of a governess, "select" concerts in the Assembly Rooms (with Catalini and Garsia in the programmes) and an occasional play at the Theatre Royal, where from time to time they had a glimpse of Fanny Kemble and Kean and Macready; and, in short, followed the approved ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... however, there was almost a stoical calm—a sensation of cloistered chastity produced by the restraint of ornament and the subdued light on gloriously painted frescoes representing evening benediction at a temple altar, a gathering of the Muses, sacrifice before a shrine of Aesculapius and Jason's voyage to Colchis for the Golden Fleece. The ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... dead to thee In this my cloistered ecstasy, In this lone shallop on the sea That drifts tow'rd Silence? And are those visioned shores I see But ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... meditation, spiritual reading, and works of mercy. (Footnote: The rule which they then adopted remains the same to this day. The Oblates of Tor di Speechi are not, strictly speaking, nuns: they take no vows, and are bound by no obligations under pain of sin; they are not cloistered, and their dress is that which was worn at the period of their establishment by the widows of the Roman nobles.) Francesca, obliged to be absent from them in body, was ever present with them in spirit. ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... academic study and leisure. At Magdalen he had been taught luxurious living, the delight of gratifying expensive tastes; he had been brought up and enervated so to speak in Capua. His vanity had been full-fed with cloistered triumphs; he was at once pleasure-loving, vainly self-confident and weak; he had been encouraged for years to give way to his emotions and to pamper his sensations, and as the Cap-and-Bells of Folly to cherish a fantastic code of honour even in ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... Anthony Wood cloistered an athletic mind, a hermit critic abstracted from the world, existing more with posterity than amid his contemporaries. His prejudices were the keener from the very energies of the mind that produced them; but, as ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... place, where she could practice acts of gratitude to the Almighty, for having saved her from the threatened fate of madness. She did not tell us quite as plain as that what her intentions were, but we soon found out, so unless anything unusual happened, you will find her yet, cloistered voluntarily in the home of some pious ladies who dwell on the outskirts of the city. Anyone will drive you there; you are on the road now; it is far enough on the outskirts of the town, but a pleasant drive for all that, and sure, ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... making, that these new writers, whose lack of pure beauty we deplore, and whose occasional gratuitous ugliness we dislike, are writing. They are protesting against its sordidness and crudity far more effectively than the cloistered reader who recites Shelley, saying "Why can't they write as he does." Like all that is human they share the qualities of their environment, like all fighters they acquire the faults of the enemy. They hate, often enough, the ugliness which a generation of progress ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... truly,' said he, 'I think that art and a monastic life wed well together, and I would willingly retire to some cloistered garden afar from the world if I might carry my box of colours with me, and might sometimes see as in a vision a face like thine to paint from.' Then was I seized with a foolish timidity so that I could in no wise answer—nay, ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... plan of this structure (fig. 5) be compared with that of the precinct of Athena and library at Pergamon (fig. 2), a striking similarity between them will at once be recognised; and, whatever may have been the destination of the building within the cloistered area, there can, I think, be little doubt that the library was contained in the five rooms beyond its limits to the east. They must have been entered from the cloister, much as those at Pergamon were. It is possible that Hadrian may himself ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... theatre. You are closer to it, and yet it is far less approachable. The edge of the counter is more sacred than the footlights. Impossible to imagine yourself leaping over it. Impossible to imagine yourself in that cloistered place behind it. Impossible to imagine how the priestesses got themselves into that place, or that they ever leave it. They are always there; they are always the same. You may go into a theatre when it is empty and dark; but did you ever go into a private ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... watershed of my sixty-foot kingdom, my legs slanting into the infinities of the North and South. It sounds unexciting when written, but there I was, astride my house, up among the vents and exhausts of my former cloistered life, my head outspinning the weathercock. My Matterhorn had been climbed, "the pikes of darkness named and stormed." Next winter when I sit below snug by the fire and hear the wind funneling down the chimney, will ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... Cappella Santa is a rich and lovely Giovanni Bellini, with sacred relics in jars above and below it, and outside is the gay little cloistered garden of the still existing monastery, with a figure of S. Francis in the midst ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... manner. She was aged about thirty but looked twenty, and wore a head-dress of grasses and ears of corn drooping over very black hair peppered with diamonds. With her long lashes against cheeks white with that transparency of complexion which characterizes women who have long led a cloistered existence, and a little ill at ease in her Parisian clothes, she resembled less one who had formerly been a woman of the harem than a nun who, having renounced her vows, was ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... and sister were at the gateway of the convent; a lay sister presided there, but there was no cloture, as the strict seclusion of a nunnery was called, and the Chevalier rode into the cloistered quadrangle as naturally as if he had been entering a secular Chateau, dismounted at the porch of the hall, and followed Madame de Bellaise to the parlour, while she dispatched a request that her niece would attend ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... behaviour, but the "Man of Law," full of grave experience of the world, is a witness above suspicion to the womanly virtue of which his narrative celebrates so illustrious an example, while the "Clerk of Oxford" has in his cloistered solitude, where all womanly blandishments are unknown, come ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... therefore, am I come to thee, Sir priest. I do confess a predilection for Thy calling; conclaves, synods, convocations, Are never held without my guiding presence; They are my field days and my exercises, While in the study and the cell I take My cloistered ease. I love all priests and am The bosom friend of many who would blush To speak to me in ...
— The Scarlet Stigma - A Drama in Four Acts • James Edgar Smith
... next morning at the watch factory. Tessie of the old days had never needed to depend on the other girls for the latest bit of gossip. Her alert eye and quick ear had always caught it first. But of late she had led a cloistered existence, indifferent to the world about her. The Chippewa Courier went into the newspaper pile behind the kitchen door without a glance from ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... in cloistered cage, Its glimmer borrowed from the grove or porch; He read the record of the planet's page By Etna's ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... loved no woman, hardly knew More of the sex that strong men woo Than cloistered monk within his cell; But now the dream ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... valor and a purer truth shall one day organize their belief. Or why should a woman liken herself to any historical woman, and think, because Sappho,[359] or Sevigne,[360] or De Stael,[361] or the cloistered souls who have had genius and cultivation, do not satisfy the imagination and the serene Themis,[362] none can,—certainly not she. Why not? She has a new and unattempted problem to solve, perchance that of the happiest nature that ever bloomed. Let the maiden, ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... But there is a medium to be observed between gluttony and absolute starvation, and "medio tutis-simus ibis," saith the proverb; and I do beg to tell those over cautious ladies and gentlemen, who seem to know no medium between the cloistered nun and the abandoned profligate, that Nature will prevail in their spite, or, as Obadiah wisely and truly said, "When lambs meet they will play." And now, reader, kind, courteous, gentle, or whatever thou art, I bid thee adieu, with the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 364 - 4 Apr 1829 • Various
... have described influenced church architecture in Italy down to the eleventh century, and such buildings as the beautiful church (Fig. 155) of San Miniato, near Florence (A.D. 1013), and the renowned group of Cathedral, Baptistery, Campanile, and Campo Santo (a kind of cloistered cemetery) at Pisa, bear a very strong resemblance in many respects to these originals; though they belong rather to the Romanesque than to the Basilican ...
— Architecture - Classic and Early Christian • Thomas Roger Smith
... encased in extraordinary shapeless shoes of undyed leather, seemed to tread down noiselessly—rather than to ostentatiously crush—the obstacles that beset the path of the young student. In the cloistered galleries of the court-yard Clarence sometimes felt himself borne down by the protecting weight of this paternal hand; in the midnight silence of the dormitory he fancied he was often conscious ...
— A Waif of the Plains • Bret Harte
... Islands, and Bute, dear to departed royalty. Afar beyond them, in the hoary magnificence of nature, rise the mountains of Argyllshire; the cairns, as my brother says, of a former world. On the other side of the road, we saw the cloistered ruins of the religious house of Southenan, a nunnery in those days of romantic adventure, when to live was to enjoy a poetical element. In such a sweet sequestered retreat, how much more pleasing to the soul it would have been, for you and I, like two captive birds in one cage, to ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... belief which never registers itself in confession. It never exercises itself in the strong, bracing air of publicity. It is a cloistered belief, and suffers from want of ventilation. Such Christians are always anaemic; indeed, they are always puny, and never get beyond the stage of spiritual babyhood. "Ye are yet babes!" Belief which is never oxygenated ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... century had been entirely in the hands of cloistered women, and the ladies who practised it learned their craft with the rest of their education in convents, and their work was simply ecclesiastical and dedicatory. At that period social burgher life in the towns had first begun to develope its love of luxury,[520] ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... could catch nestlings' faint cries, stirrings of dead leaves and twigs, as birds and beasts moved to their homes; the cooing of the rooks about the black branches seemed to promise that this world should be for ever tranquil, for ever cloistered and removed; the sun, red and flaming above the dark wood, flung white mists hither and thither to veil its departure. The silence deepened, the last light flamed on the river ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... from the country to which our republic is indebted for a third of its territory, including the ground on which we stand; from the land which has taught us that the most scholarly devotion to the languages and learning of the cloistered past is compatible with leadership in the practical application of modern science to the arts of life; from the island whose language and literature have found a new field and a vigorous growth in this region; ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... particularly those of earlier date than any Spanish picture reproduced here, we feel the strong impress of the Church. In the picture by Alonso Cano there looks out from the eyes of the Mother the sentiment of the cloistered nun; and though, with the Murillos, we catch a glimpse of Spain outside of the Church, even with him there is a sense of subjection from which the memories of the Inquisition ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... hope hard in the subtle thing That's spirit: though cloistered fast, soar free; Account as wood, brick, stone, this ring Of the ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... cloistered court he found, A fountain in the midst o'erthrown and dry, And in the cloister briers twining round The slender shafts; the wondrous imagery Outworn by more than many years gone by, Because the country people, in their fear Of ...
— The Earthly Paradise - A Poem • William Morris
... some private individuals, they are merely the last representatives of a scattered crowd of worshippers. The church dominates all; each street is one of its veins; the town has no other breath than its own. On that account, this spirit of another age, this religious torpor from the past, makes the cloistered city which surrounds it redolent with a savoury perfume of ...
— The Dream • Emile Zola
... first establishment in Europe, and was obliged to keep up the most refined and luxurious Court in Europe; and all upon means no greater than had been assigned to many of the former bigoted Queens, who led a cloistered life, retired from the world without circulating their wealth among the nation which supplied them with so large a revenue; and yet who lived and died uncensured for hoarding from the nation what ought at least to have been in part expended ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... arrangements. Therefore, obviously, it is one which may be pursued in all of these, and may be sought whatsoever we are doing. All occupations of life except only sin are consistent with this highest aim. It needs not that we should seek any remote or cloistered form of life, nor sheer off any legitimate and common interests and occupations, but in them all we may be seeking for the one thing, the moulding of our characters into the shapes that are pleasing to Him. 'One thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I seek after, that ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... hour by train,—the country round about our camp seemed to be quite cut off from the rest of the world. With the exception of our Sunday afternoons of leave, when we joined the boulevardiers in town, we lived a life as remote and cloistered as that of some brotherhood of monks in an inaccessible monastery. That is how it appeared to me, although here again I am in danger of making it seem that my own impressions were those of all the others. This of course was not true. The spirit ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... to law, or from concrete fact to abstract conception, until it shall reach the Ultima Thule of all law, is to carry the faith of the scientist beyond the most transcendental belief of the theologian, and make him a greater dupe to his illusions than was ever cloistered in a monastery or affected austerity therein as a balm to the flesh. We may substitute new dogmatisms for old ones, but we can never postulate a principle that shall make the general laws of nature any less mysterious than the partial or exceptional, or that shall in the long run, render "natural ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... on another side, wholly pious and sacrificial. The Middle Ages were, in their way, merry, sturdy, and mischievous. A fresh breath, as of convalescence, breathed through their misery. Never was spring so green and lovely as when men greeted it in a cloistered garden, with hearts quite empty and clean, only half-awakened from a long trance of despair. It mattered little at such a moment where a work was to figure or whether any one should ever enjoy it. The pleasure and the function lay here, ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... appealed to him—charm; and the quieter it was, the more he liked it. And this one had charm, shadowy as afternoon sunlight on those Italian hills and valleys he had loved. The feeling, too, that she was, as it were, apart, cloistered, made her seem nearer to himself, a strangely desirable companion. When a man is very old and quite out of the running, he loves to feel secure from the rivalries of youth, for he would still be first in the heart of beauty. And he drank his hock, and watched ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... enjoyment in reserve for you; and when you next visit our end of the little island, pass not, we beseech you, those Gothic towers, massive and rich, or taper spires rising majestically above the cloistered arches, buttresses, and pinnacles, of these monuments of the piety, consummate skill, and humility of our ancestors; for no modern black board, with gilt letters, proclaims the name of their founders, who have sought a simple, perchance a nameless, tomb within the sacred walls ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... far my reckoning doth go straight & even, But, Cromwell, this same ployding fits not thee: Thy mind is altogether set on travel, And not to live thus cloistered like a Nun. It is not this same trash that i regard, Experience is the jewel ...
— Cromwell • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... culture ought to be the leaders in maintaining the standards of citizenship. Unless they can and do accomplish this result education is a failure. Greatly have they been taught, greatly must they teach. The power to think is the most practical thing in the world. It is not and cannot be cloistered ...
— Have faith in Massachusetts; 2d ed. - A Collection of Speeches and Messages • Calvin Coolidge
... came from the Burlington Arcade. He often lunched at the Berkeley and frequently dined at Willis's. Also he had laughed at the antics of Arthur Roberts, and gazed through a pair of gold-mounted opera-glasses at Empire ballets and at the discreet juggleries of Paul Cinquevalli. The romance of cloistered saintliness was not his. If it had been he might never have rebelled. For how often it is romance which makes a home for religion in the heart of man, romance which feathers the nest of purity in which the hermit soul ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... sleigh bells peal across the snow; The frost's sharp arrows touch the earth and lo! How diamond-bright the stars do scintillate When Night hath lit her lamps to Heaven's gate. To the dim forest's cloistered arches go, And seek the holly and the mistletoe; For soon the bells of Christmas-tide will ring To hail ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various
... They were placed with their back to the entrance court, and were divided into two groups; the sovereign, his male children and their attendants, inhabited the western one, while the women and their slaves were cloistered, so to speak, in the northern set. The royal dwelling had an external exit by means of a passage issuing on the north-west of the enclosure, and it also communicated with the great courtyard by a vaulted corridor which ran along one side of the base of the ziggurat: the doors ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... lute; And twice her hand essayed the strings, and twice She faltered in her task; then tenderly, As for an old sad tale of hopeless years, With drooping head and fingers deft she poured Her soul forth into melodies. Now slow The plectrum led to prayer the cloistered chords, Now loudly with the crash of falling rain, Now soft as the leaf whispering of words, Now loud and soft together as the long Patter of pearls and seed-pearls on a dish Of marble; liquid now as from the bush Warbles the mango bird; meandering Now as the streamlet seawards; ...
— A Lute of Jade/Being Selections from the Classical Poets of China • L. Cranmer-Byng
... superficial judges of one another: where customs differ they often remark only the salient distinctive points which, when examined, prove to be of minor importance. Europeans seeing and hearing that women in the East are "cloistered" as the Grecian matron was wont and ; that wives may not walk out with their husbands and cannot accompany them to "balls and parties"; moreover, that they are always liable, like the ancient Hebrew, to the mortification of the "sister-wife," ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... debts might be secret; but my frequent absence was visible and scandalous: and a tour to Bath, a visit into Buckingham-shire, and four excursions to London in the same winter, were costly and dangerous frolics. They were, indeed, without a meaning, as without an excuse. The irksomeness of a cloistered life repeatedly tempted me to wander; but my chief pleasure was that of travelling; and I was too young and bashful to enjoy, like a Manly Oxonian in Town, the pleasures of London. In all these excursions I eloped from Oxford; I returned to college; in a few days I eloped ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... the eternal lamp and hid the eternal hill, A world's destruction loading, the word went onward still— The blaze of creeds passed into it, the hiss of horrid fires, The headlong spear, the scarlet cross, the hair-shirt and the briars, The cloistered brethren's thunderous chaunt, the errant champion's song, The shifting of the crowns and thrones, the ...
— Poems • G.K. Chesterton
... of an infancy so cloistered and uniform as mine, such a real adventure as my being publicly and successfully kidnapped cannot be overlooked. There were several 'innocents' in our village—harmless eccentrics who had more or less unquestionably ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... and not to dispense them. Those who resorted to the library were kept at arm's length, as it were, and the fewer there were who came, the better the grim or studious custodian was pleased. Every inquiry which broke the profound silence of the cloistered library was a kind of rude interruption, and when it was answered, the perfunctory librarian resumed his reading or his studies. The institution appeared to exist, not for the benefit of the people, but for that of the librarian; or for the benefit, besides, of a few ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... way with all that generous ardor so natural to youth. But, whatever you do, whatever the choice you may make, you will occasion the future weal or woe of many, perhaps for many generations. Whether spouse of Jesus Christ or of man, whether mother of a family or of the poor, whether a cloistered nun or a celibate in the world, you will neither save nor lose your soul alone; the effects of your virtues or vices shall be reproduced, long after your departure from the scene of life, in the lives of beings yet unborn, in favor ...
— Serious Hours of a Young Lady • Charles Sainte-Foi
... Chauvet maintained we should take account of the influence exercised by the cloistered life on the complexion of young women; you see, he was a student of ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... teaches that the highest spirituality of nature is not found in avoiding the duties and cares of life, or in seeking a cloistered and solitary existence. The piety of monkery is not the crown of living. It is neither an experience of healthy joy nor of abundant fruitfulness. The healthful influences of Christianity are immeasurably more beautiful when manifested in the joys of family and home life, or in the discharge of honest ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... The cloistered seclusion of Gray's Inn grew daily more irksome. There he would sit, in mute despair, drumming the table with his fingers, and biting the quill, whose use he so bitterly contemned. Of winter afternoons he would ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... surrounding abbeys were educated. Mr. A.H. Thompson, in his Cambridge and its Colleges, suggests that the unhealthy dampness of the fens would have made it very desirable that the less robust of the youths who were training for the cloistered life in the abbeys of East Anglia should be transferred to the drier and healthier town, where the learning of France was available among the many ...
— Beautiful Britain—Cambridge • Gordon Home
... angry and discontented. After her neglected and oppressed younger days, the courtesy and admiration she had received for the last ten days had the effect of making her like a spoilt child; and when they entered the inner cloistered court within, and were met by the Lady Prioress, at the head of all her sisters in black dresses, she hardly vouchsafed an inclination of the head in reply to the graceful and courtly welcome with ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the gold of Ophir, with the precious onyx, or the sapphire. No mention shall be made of coral or of pearls; for the price of wisdom is above rubies.'—The clergyman is with his parishioners and among them; he is neither in the cloistered cell, nor in the wilderness, but a neighbour and family man, whose education and rank admit him to the mansion of the rich landholder, while his duties make him the frequent visitor of the farm-house and the cottage. He is, or he may become, ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... were cloistered openings; sunny little meadows inclining to a spring, where the wild pea-vine, plant beloved of horses, and infallible sign of a rich soil, grew knee-deep. Such an opening they learned, however small, was quaintly dignified by the natives with ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... forth to look once more at picturesque, cloistered, verdant Berne. Nothing appeared to be changed, though the strangers were but few, and there was, perhaps, less movement than formerly. We crossed the Aar, and walked to La Lorraine. As we were going through the fields, several dogs rushed out against us; but ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... beautifully kept turf, at once in perfect harmony and agreeable contrast with the rugged walls of the weather-beaten cathedral: the quiet soft colouring of the ancient buildings and that look of cloistered seclusion only to be found in the peaceful nooks of cathedral cities are seen here ...
— The Cathedral Church of Canterbury [2nd ed.]. • Hartley Withers
... go later, and really intended to do so. She drove to the convent in which Donna Clementina was now a cloistered nun, and asked the portress whether Donna Sabina Conti had been to see her sister on the previous day. The portress answered that she had not, and was quite positive of the fact. The Baroness looked at her watch and hastened to the Palazzo Conti. When she got there, the porter ...
— The Heart of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... of the learned, not merely from monasticism, but also from the true spirit of Christianity. The minds of the Italians assimilated paganism. In their hatred of mediaeval ignorance, in their loathing of cowled and cloistered fools, they flew to an extreme, and affected the manner of an irrevocable past. This extravagance led of necessity to a reaction—in the North, of Puritanism; in the South, to what has been termed the Counter-Reformation effected ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... injustice to this mystical aspiration of the Psalmist, if we degrade it to be the mere expression of a desire for unbroken residence in a material Temple. He was no sickly, sentimental seeker after cloistered seclusion. He knew the necessities and duties of life far better than in a cowardly way to wish to shirk them, in order that he might loiter in the temple, idle under the pretence of worship. Nor would the saying ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... ancient unsophisticated days Women were valued for their cloistered ways. And won at Rome encouragement from man Only because they stayed at home and span; While PERICLES in Attic Greek expressed The view that those least talked about were best. There were exceptions, but the normal Greek Regarded ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 8, 1914 • Various
... embraced, unless it be foreign languages, including wild Irish, and very low English. Even as late as 1722, Lord Ferrers lived in Convent Garden; but this is trifling compared with the list of nobles who have lived around about this attractive spot, where nuns wandered in cloistered innocence, and now, oh! for sentimentality, what a relief to a fine, sensitive mind, or a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 357 - Vol. XIII, No. 357., Saturday, February 21, 1829 • Various
... is a stunner, dad, and then a trifle. But I regret to say that she is too fresh from the cloistered halls of learning. You see I have been out of college three years and have managed to forget such a jolly lot that I really couldn't talk to her. She'd want me to make love in Latin and correspond in Greek. Worse than that, she understands Browning. No, poor Mary will have to marry a prescription ...
— Officer 666 • Barton W. Currie
... of industry, and tongues kept pace with fingers. The hospital was a world, like the Street. The nurses had come from many places, and, like cloistered nuns, seemed to have left the other world behind. A new President of the country was less real than a new interne. The country might wash its soiled linen in public; what was that compared with enough sheets ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... In the church of the Monastero Maggiore at Milan, dedicated to S. Maurizio, Lombard architecture and fresco-painting may be studied in this rare combination. The monastery itself, one of the oldest in Milan, formed a retreat for cloistered virgins following the rule of S. Benedict. It may have been founded as early as the tenth century; but its church was rebuilt in the first two decades of the sixteenth, between 1503 and 1519, and was immediately ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... has chanced to others—as chanced, for example, to Mangan—outcast from home, health and hope, with a charred past and a bleared future, an anchorite without detachment and self-cloistered without self-sufficingness, deposed from a world which he had not abdicated, pierced with thorns which formed no crown, a poet hopeless of the bays and a martyr hopeless of the palm, a land cursed ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... of eve descending Throw o'er cloistered courts their gloom, Dimly with the twilight blending Memories long forgotten loom. From the bright fire's falling embers Faces smile that smiled of yore; Till my heart again remembers Hopes and thoughts that live ...
— Sagittulae, Random Verses • E. W. Bowling
... indolence of the monastic life began to be diverted from a constant meditation upon "antiphoners, grailes, and psalters,"[212] towards subjects of a more generally interesting nature. I am willing to admit every degree of merit to the manual dexterity of the cloistered student. I admire his snow-white vellum missals, emblazoned with gold, and sparkling with carmine and ultramarine blue. By the help of the microscopic glass, I peruse his diminutive penmanship, executed with the most astonishing neatness and regularity; and often wish in my heart ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... living source of British prestige, an unifying factor in the consolidation of the British Empire, and a powerful element in the maintenance of fraternal relations with the United States, seems therefore no unreasonable demand. Neither cloistered study of his plays, nor the occasional representation of them in the theatres, brings home to either the English-speaking or the English-reading world the full extent of the debt that England owes to Shakespeare. A monumental memorial, which should symbolise Shakespeare's influence ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... this court stood the building, with the date 1437 cut on the front. On each side, a row of gables looked upon the enclosed space, most venerable old gables, with heavy mullioned windows filled with little diamond panes of glass, and opening on lattices. On two sides there was a cloistered walk, under echoing arches, and in the midst a spacious lawn of the greenest and loveliest grass, such as England only can show, and which, there, is of perennial verdure and beauty. In the midst stood a stone statue of a venerable man, ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... and soon were lost to view Within the gateway of a rocky cliff; Sometimes came glimpses of them as they climbed The sloping passages within the cliff— A cloistered corridor of carven columns— And paused a moment at some rocky window To see the grandeur of the mountain heights. The soft notes of a trumpet called them up, And silver bells were ...
— Parsifal - A Drama by Wagner • Retold by Oliver Huckel
... recluses deceived by self- righteousness, and men of affairs devoutly faithful to sober duty. Catherine enters into every consciousness. As a rule we associate with very pure and spiritual women, even if not cloistered, a certain deficient sense of reality. We cherish them, and shield them from harsh contact with the world, lest the fine flower of their delicacy be withered. But no one seems to have felt in this way about Catherine. Her "love for souls" was no cold electric illumination ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... exaggeration here. The Prince was not living a life 'fugitive and cloistered' for three whole unbroken years. But the convent of St. Joseph was one of his hiding-places from 1749 to 1752. Of Madame de Vasse I have been unable to learn much: a lady of that name was presented at Court in 1745, and the Duc de Luynes describes her as 'conveniently handsome.' She is always ...
— Pickle the Spy • Andrew Lang
... lived a fugitive and cloistered existence till the man who, he says, was to have assassinated him, de Vergy, sought his alliance, and accused de Guerchy of having suborned him to murder the little daredevil. A grand jury brought in a true bill against ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... succeeded in reaching France. The story of his capture had arrived before him, and his brothers in France welcomed him as a saint and martyr, as one miraculously snatched from the jaws of death. But he had no thought of remaining to enjoy the cloistered quiet and peace of a college in France; back to the hardships and dangers of North America his unconquerable spirit demanded that he should go. According to the rules of the Church he could not administer the sacraments with his mutilated hands; but, having obtained a special dispensation from the ...
— The Jesuit Missions: - A Chronicle of the Cross in the Wilderness • Thomas Guthrie Marquis
... miles of the journey led through the cloistered archways of bamboo. We crossed the Kauffman River, swimming the horses down stream. Then the muddy roads began. The constant rains had long ago reduced them to a state of paste, and although some attempt had been made to stiffen them with a filling of dried cocoanut-husks, the sucking ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... was reared A monumental shrine, Where cloistered sisters gathering round, Made night and morn the aisle resound With ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... influence, and discharged their duties worthily. Within convent walls, too, it was possible for some women to become learned; though in later times the achievements of Diemudis were never rivalled. She was a nun at Wessobrunn in Bavaria at the end of the eleventh century, and during her cloistered life her active pen wrote out 47 volumes, including two complete Bibles, one of which was given in exchange ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... notes of each strain, which are sudden and on a high key; the second, by the graceful chromatic slide to the termination, which is inimitable and exceedingly solemn. I have sometimes thought that a part of the delightful influence of these notes might be attributable to the cloistered situations from which they were delivered. But I have occasionally heard them while the bird was singing from a tree in an open field, when they were equally pleasing and impressive. I am not peculiar in my admiration of this little songster. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various |
