Diccionario ingles.comDiccionario ingles.com
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Seclusion   Listen
noun
Seclusion  n.  The act of secluding, or the state of being secluded; separation from society or connection; a withdrawing; privacy; as, to live in seclusion. "O blest seclusion from a jarring world, which he, thus occupied, enjoys!"
Synonyms: Solitude; separation; withdrawment; retirement; privacy. See Solitude.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Seclusion" Quotes from Famous Books



... of the San Francisco or any other conflagration. The "sparkling" Rhine, the "still" Moselle, the far-famed "Dutchess," the German of Freeport, the Traders of Chicago, the Austrian Phoenix, the Calumet, the American of Boston and others soon after sought the seclusion which a receiver or cessation of business in California grants, and like the Arab, they folded their ...
— The Spirit of 1906 • George W. Brooks

... off to Loo intelligence of the affront which had been offered to his country and his master, had solicited instructions, and had determined that, till these instructions should arrive, he would live in strict seclusion. He did not think that he should be justified in quitting his post without express orders; but his earnest hope was that he should be directed to turn his back in contemptuous defiance on the Court which had dared to treat England ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... fact that Parzival was a great-grandson of Titurel; his mother, fearing he would die young, like his father, were he to become a knight, brought him up in seclusion, telling him nothing about knights, fighting, or the world. Straying in the forest one day this youth encountered a couple of knights, whom he mistook for angels, owing to their bright array, and offered to worship. The knights, however, refused his homage, and good-naturedly ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber

... on the death of her elder brother, had left town for the seclusion of her country home, carrying Perpetua with her. She had grown very fond of the girl, and the fancy she had formed (before Sir Hastings' death) that Thaddeus was in love with the young heiress, and that ...
— A Little Rebel - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford

... the same sullen answer to every visitor for four weeks, shutting herself up in stern seclusion, determined that, whatever cruel comments they made, the neighbourhood should have no power of spying into the mystery of "that poor Mrs. Locke Harper who did not live happy with her husband." For so she felt sure had been the result of that fatal ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)

... alive to pity their condition, and have a regard to the weaknesses incidental to the literary profession. Galley-slave, forsooth! If you are sent to prison for some error for which the law awards that sort of laborious seclusion, so much the more shame for you. If you are chained to the oar a prisoner of war, like Cervantes, you have the pain, but not the shame, and the friendly compassion of mankind to reward you. Galley-slaves, indeed! What man has not his oar to pull? There is that wonderful old stroke-oar ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray

... And then its seclusion:—while its neighbors—the Temple mansion among them—had been placed boldly out to the full building line where they could see and be seen, the Seymours, with that spirit of aloofness which had marked ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith

... rose or something nice, and I'd write 'em on pink paper—I would!" Susan reflected. But Lisle was wiser. There is no perfume for a young ladies' school like a whiff of cigar-smoke. To that prim, half convent-like seclusion, where manners are being formed and the proprieties are strictly observed, it comes as a pleasant suggestion of something worldly and masculine, just a little ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various

... processes were all serious, and whose hobby was method, Mr. Galbraith had established a custom of giving himself a quiet half-hour of inviolable seclusion in which to read and consider his mail. During this sacred interval the stenographer, standing guard in the outer office, had instructions to deny his chief to callers of any and every degree. Wherefore, when, at twenty minutes to eleven, the door of the private ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde

... virgin white, was reclining on the end of a distant couch. The seclusion in which they lived might have rendered this female a little careless of her appearance, or, what was more probable, the comb had been found unequal to its burden; for her tresses, which rivaled the hue and gloss of the raven, had ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper

... may be clapped at once and ignominiously into irons, thus to be carried to their promised land, the port of destination, and alas! brought back in the same way to that from which they started, and there delivered over to the magistrates and the seclusion of a county jail. Since I crossed the Atlantic, one miserable stowaway was found in a dying state among the fuel, uttered but a word or two, and departed for a farther country ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... save her from. They say she prefers guilty freedom to marriage; but no one, himself of account, believes it—the constitution of her household forbids the taint. They say she avails herself of seclusion to indulge uncanonized worship. In plain terms, my son, it is said she is ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace

... in a vast metropolis, after a life of rural seclusion, has without doubt a very peculiar effect upon the mind. The immense population, the multiplicity of objects, the important interests hourly impressed upon the intelligence, the continually occurring events, the noise, the bustle, the general and widely-spread excitement, all combine ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli

... they have come, not wholly to offer you consolation, but to confer with you upon some business matters upon which it would be advantageous for you to inform yourself? Your grief and desire for seclusion are most natural, under the circumstances, but one must sometimes consider earthly things also." The minister's evidently eager desire to be present at an interview with the great men and to place himself on a more familiar ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander

... our unfavourable system of education, have yet held at times some intercourse with nature, and with those great minds whose works have been moulded by the spirit of nature; who, therefore, when they pass from the seclusion and constraint of early study, bring with them into the new scene of the world much of the pure sensibility which is the spring of all that is greatly good in thought and action. To such the season of that entrance into the world is a season ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth

... into other bodies. As a proof of this belief he speaks of the practice of burning and burying with the dead things appropriate to the needs of the living. Lucan, the Latin poet, in his Pharsalia, refers to the seclusion of the Druids' groves and to their doctrine of immortality. The Scholiasts' notes on this passage are after the manner of their kind, and add very little to our knowledge. In Pliny's Natural History (xvi, 249), however, ...
— Celtic Religion - in Pre-Christian Times • Edward Anwyl

... human—the purified man or woman of the better land. The recluse is ever the true prophet and seer, in this as in still higher matters. Your modest-eyed student, stealing glances of unfeigned admiration at ordinary maidens, is not such a simpleton as some suppose. His seclusion has cleared his vision. He sees on through the eons—sees things as they will or may be—regards the objects of his adoration as he will in the angelhood. Why will so many decry this admiration?—when they see that, not till the youth ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various

... a vision of what it is to be learned, to explore the great fields of knowledge which the Infinite has spread before the world. And this vision has driven her out from the seclusion of her own quiet life that she might give this ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various

... smoking-room, his books, and his plants had been everything to him. Now he began to surround himself with an infinity of feminine belongings, and to promise himself an infinity of feminine blessings, wondering much that he should have been content to pass so long a portion of his life in the dull seclusion which he had endured. He was not by nature an impatient man; but now he became impatient, longing for the fruition of his new idea of happiness,—longing to have that as his own which he certainly loved beyond all else in the world, and which, perhaps, was all he had ever loved with ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope

... away, to prevent any chat between Sir William and Mr Jones. But, once in the carriage, in all the glory of being surrounded and watched by a number of gaping clowns and shouting boys, she could not resolve to bury herself in the seclusion of the Hall, without enjoying the bustle a little longer. She therefore suddenly discovered that she wanted to order a morning cap at Miss Nares'; and the carriage drew up in state before the milliner's door. Miss Flint, whose hair had come out of curl, from ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau

... The seclusion of the abbess, and the aversion between the two ladies, which was very cordial on the side of the holy one, cut off all hopes from the lovers. Azora grew grave and pensive and melancholy; Orondates surly and ...
— Hieroglyphic Tales • Horace Walpole

... Guenzburg arrived only after a long, severe, though silent, struggle in the seclusion of his closet. His active mind would not at first surrender unconditionally to the coercion of custom. But his conception of ceremonialism served him in good stead on many an occasion in his eventful life. Being an expedient to preserve harmony, it may and must vary with change ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin

... carbon counterfeits! The prospect of a life of ease and elegance faded away. It had been a vision, an illusion. Nickie's philosophy was not proof against this stroke. He felt broken, beaten. In the seclusion of his small room in a respectable suburban boarding-house, Nicholas wept and brooded. And now that the possibility of the splendid reward was gone, Nickie dwelt upon the fearful risk he had run more than he had done in all the long months since he knelt by the murdered man ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson

... had told me then I should make my next visit with you to take care of me, how pleased I should have been," said Ermine, laughing, and taking as usual an invalid's pleasure in all the little novelties only remarked after long seclusion. That steep, winding, pebbly road, with the ferns and creeping plants on its rocky sides, was a wonderful panorama to her, and she entreated for a stop at the summit to look down on the sea and the town; but here Grace came out to them ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge

... and preserves, or perhaps a bottle of champagne, are brought in by way of refreshments. The female members of the family you must not expect to see, unless you are an intimate friend; for the merchants still retain something of that female seclusion which was in vogue among the upper classes before the time of Peter the Great. The host himself will probably be an intelligent, but totally uneducated ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace

... in his personality and in his music which seemed to her to preclude the possibility of his dwelling always in peace. But she hoped he would be true to his instinct, to the strange instinct which kept him now in a sort of cloistered seclusion. She knew he had friends, acquaintances, made during his time at the College of Music, through the introductions he had brought to London from Cornwall, through family connections. Human intercourse must be part of every life. But she was glad, very glad, that neither ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens

... Again and again the ordinary Hindu householder, lacking the desperate courage of the Rajput, stood by helpless, like the Armenian of to-day, while his wife and daughter were carried off from before his eyes, to increase the harem of his ruler. Small wonder that seclusion became the order of the day—a woman would better spend her life behind the purdah of her own home than be added to the zenana of her conqueror. Later when the throes of conquest were over and Hindu women once more ventured forth to a wedding or a festival, small wonder ...
— Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India • Alice B. Van Doren

... early and Josiah left me to Philander's and went on to do some errents. He thought I wuz to spend the evenin' with her in becomin' seclusion, a-knittin' on his blue and white socks, as a woman should. But after visitin' a spell, jest after it got duskish, we went out the back door and went cross lots, and got there ensconced in the dark corner without anybody seein' us and before the ...
— Samantha on the Woman Question • Marietta Holley

... the cloistral Gothic seclusion in which the Abbey hotel reposes that commends it to the wise: there is the further allurement of Long John. Long John, or De Lange Jan, is the soaring tower of the Abbey church, now the Nieuwe Kerk. So long have his nearly 300 feet dominated Middelburg—he was first built in the thirteenth century, ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas

... such a 'Palace of Art' that Des Esseintes would recreate his already over-wrought body and brain, and the monotony of its seclusion is only once broken by a single excursion into the world without. This one episode of action, this one touch of realism, in a book given over to the artificial, confined to a record of sensation, is a projected ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons

... on in search of new beauties and the hidden delights we feel sure must be behind the clipped hedges or the trellis walls. Even when we come to the end we are not quite sure it is the end, and we steep ourselves in seclusion and quiet, knowing full well that to-morrow or to-night perhaps when the moon is up and we come back as we promise ourselves to do, surely we shall see that ideal corner that is the last word of the perfection of our ...
— The House in Good Taste • Elsie de Wolfe

... knew before I took the veil; for it is a frequent subject of remark, that such or such a Father is on a "holy retreat." This is a term which conveys the idea of a religious seclusion from the world for sacred purposes. On the re-appearance of the priest after such a period, in the church or the streets, it is natural to feel a peculiar impression of his devout character—an impression very different from that conveyed ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk

... dwell upon the abstract wife he had sometimes gone a step further and conjured up the abstract baby. The result had always been to fill him with a firm conviction that the most persuasive of wild horses should not drag him from his bachelor seclusion. He had had definite ideas on babies as a class. And here he was with his world pivoting on one of them. ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse

... pervades his address and manners, which are, however, far from being easy or elegant. The crowds that he must have been accustomed to see since his present elevation have not lessened a timidity the consequence of early seclusion. Nothing troubled him more than the numerous deputations of our Senate, Legislative Body, Tribunate, National Institute, Tribunals, etc., that teased him on every occasion. He never was suspected of any vices, but all his virtues ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton

... remarked that there were countless bodies of the Irish peasantry who still believed that Parnell had not died, that the sad pageant of his funeral and burial was a prearranged show to deceive his enemies, and that the time would soon come when the mighty leader would emerge from his seclusion to captain the hosts of Irish nationality in the final battle for independence. This idea lately found expression in a powerful play by Mr Lennox Robinson, ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan

... poets say, life is a dream, I am sure in a voyage these are the visions which best serve to pass away the long night. Other losses, although not at first felt, tell heavily after a period: these are the want of room, of seclusion, of rest; the jading feeling of constant hurry; the privation of small luxuries, the loss of domestic society and even of music and the other pleasures of imagination. When such trifles are mentioned, it is evident that the real ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin

... it. Originally painted brown, with the flight of time it has taken a grayish tinge, as if in sympathy with its venerable proprietor. It stands back from the roadway, and in summer has an air of modest seclusion. Elms, maples, and shrubbery give to the passer-by but chance glimpses of the wide veranda, which is indicated, rather than revealed, beyond the ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe

... the utmost verge of human endurance—seclusion, and the pertinacious fixing of the mind on one subject—obstinate gloating on some morbid fancy, rarely failed to bring about hallucinations with all the garb of reality. Physicians are well aware that the more frequently these diseased conditions of the mind are sought, ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton

... several at the age of ten. Yet the religious dignity of the throne remained undiminished, or, rather, continued [263] to grow. The more the Mikado was withdrawn from public view by policy and by ceremonial, the more did his seclusion and inaccessibility serve to deepen the awe of the divine legend. Like the Lama of Thibet the living deity was made invisible to the multitude; and gradually the belief arose that to look upon his face was death.... ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn

... than ever for any sound from that mysterious room. But no sound came. The afternoon passed wearily away; the light began to fail, and at last he had to confess to himself that the waiting, the being always on the alert, the enforced seclusion and detention, the desire for proper food and drink—especially the latter—was becoming too much for him, and that his nerves were beginning to suffer. Was Joseph Chestermarke never coming? Had he gone off somewhere?—possibly leaving a dead man behind, ...
— The Chestermarke Instinct • J. S. Fletcher

... method is a very occasional touch of gentle irony, as when he permits himself to say of G. W. E. RUSSELL (to whose Portraits of the Seventies the present volume is intended as a sequel) that he "used to drive about London in a carriage picked out in colours that did not suggest that he sought seclusion." I have no space for the barest list of the sitters in Mr. HUTCHINSON'S crowded picture of a time rich in character, his treatment of which aims rather at covering a wide ground than at intimacy of detail. To mention but one, it is interesting to compare his General GORDON with the recent presentment ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 26, 1920 • Various

... opportunities of Kensington Gardens—the Round Pond, the winding Serpentine, the mysterious seclusion of the Dutch brick Palace! Genii swarm there. One jostles possibilities. It is a land of romance, bounded on the north by the Abyss of Bayswater, and on the south by the Amphitheatre of the Albert Hall. But for a centre of adventure I choose the Long Walk; it beckoned me somewhat as the North-West ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen

... That friend—now in her eighty-seventh year—used, in days long gone by, to gather round her table many of the wits and celebrities of fifty years ago; but for her, as for myself, our little country home has been as dear for its seclusion as for the ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various

... lonesome for 'ee in the heth tonight, mis'ess," said Christian, coming from the seclusion he had hitherto maintained. "Mind you don't get lost. Egdon Heth is a bad place to get lost in, and the winds do huffle queerer tonight than ever I heard 'em afore. Them that know Egdon best have been pixy-led here ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy

... yesterday morning, the Academicians, Associates, and Students, assembled in the Great Exhibition-room, and the nobility, gentry, and the deceased's private friends, soon after arrived, and joined the mournful band. The chief mourners were in seclusion in the library of the Academy. About half-past twelve o'clock, the whole of the arrangements having been effected, the Procession moved from Somerset House to St. Paul's ...
— The Life, Studies, And Works Of Benjamin West, Esq. • John Galt

... when the belated pair, at two o'clock in the morning, had skulked up a side stairway of the old hotel, and gained John's room, with nothing more serious happening than Bert falling over a trunk and smashing his guitar,—just after such a night of romance and adventure it was that, in the seclusion of John's room, Bert had something of especial ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley

... brighter glory round human death. He has hitherto been receiving the homage of almost unequalled popularity. We are now to observe him reft of every admirer, every soother, every friend. He has been hitherto overcoming the temptations of existence by entire seclusion from them all. We are now to ask how he will stem those seductions when he is brought into the very midst of them, and the whole outward aspect of his life has laid aside its distinctive and peculiar character; when he has ceased ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson

... lower end of the field which they had now entered was a strip of woods, which promised seclusion and freedom from interruption. Poor Kit, as he was dragged forward by his relentless captor, found his spirits sinking ...
— The Young Acrobat of the Great North American Circus • Horatio Alger Jr.

... quarrels. Until less than ten years ago, there was justification for the point of view; for while England seemed to be ever on the brink of war, the United States lived peacefully in her far-off Valley of Avilion. But the map of the world has changed, and while the United States has left her seclusion and come out to play her part in the world-politics, England has been buttressing herself with friendships, until it is at least arguable whether the United States is not the more exposed to danger of the two. But it ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson

... flower-garden, containing rare specimens of exotic flowers, and gigantic cactuses, and also an aviary, with vultures, doves, and singing birds. We did not see half the garden, but, stiff and formal as its general arrangement is, it is a beautiful place,—a delightful, sunny, and serene seclusion. Whatever it may be to the pope, two young lovers might find the Garden of Eden here, and never desire to stray out of its precincts. They might fancy angels standing in the long, glimmering vistas ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... returned, "loved quiet and seclusion. He was willing to develop the pearl fisheries, but objected to the flock of adventurers sure to descend upon his island if its wealth of pearls became generally known. His colony he selected with great care and with few exceptions ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Out West • Edith Van Dyne

... seclusion till the following Tuesday; after that day he was seen no more in Washington. From time to time some news of him filters through the diplomatic circles of half a dozen capitals to Washington. The latest I heard of him, he was at Port Arthur. It was evident that Russia valued his personal address ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath

... darting about the trees, exclaiming at each morsel that they glean. Carrying sun glints on their backs wherever they go, they should make the gloomiest misanthrope feel the season's charm. They are so sociable and confiding, feeling as much at home in the trees by the house as in seclusion." ...
— Birds, Illustrated by Color Photography, Vol. II, No 3, September 1897 • Various

... he called her a heart of gold—say what you like! and firmly believed both in her love for art and her comprehension of art! One day after dinner at the Aratovs', in discussing the princess and her evenings, he began to persuade Yakov to break for once from his anchorite seclusion, and to allow him, Kupfer, to present him to his friend. Yakov at first would not even hear of it. 'But what do you imagine?' Kupfer cried at last: 'what sort of presentation are we talking about? Simply, I take you, just as you are sitting now, in your everyday coat, and go with you to her ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev

... Attempts to entrap Galileo His summons before the Inquisition at Rome The injunction to silence, and the condemnation of the theory of the earth's motion The work of Copernicus placed on the Index Galileo's seclusion Renewed attacks ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... polite, cheerful, industrious, skilful, and in the best sense of the word artistic hereditary craftsmanship is proving only too easy a prey to the new industrial system. It is a sad reflection that the country which, owing to her long period of seclusion, had the opportunity of applying to all the things of common life so remarkable a skill and artistry, should be so little conscious of the pace at which her industrial rake's progress is proceeding, so insensible to the degree to which she is prodigally sacrificing that which, when it is lost ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott

... entertain but few prejudices against the pleasures of the world, and have certainly not distressed their parents, as too many English girls have lately done, by any enthusiastic wish to devote themselves to the seclusion of a Protestant nunnery. Dr. Proudie's sons are still ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope

... they journeyed beyond Semneh they left them there until their return, the danger and hardships of the desert journey being too great for them to encounter, and it was therefore thought advisable that the girls should remain in seclusion. ...
— The Cat of Bubastes - A Tale of Ancient Egypt • G. A. Henty

... previously trifling) deep on his head, hind side before, and being unable to get it off again; which accident presenting to his terrified imagination a dismal picture of his passing the rest of his days in darkness, and in hopeless seclusion from his friends and family, caused him to struggle with great violence, and to utter suffocating cries. Being released, his face was discovered to be very hot, and red, and damp; and Miss Tox took him ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens

... hospitably received by the Natchalnik, whose wife kissed the visitor's hand on his arrival, in compliance with the old Servian customs, now fast wearing out, which assign to woman a social position intermediate between the seclusion of eastern manners and the graceful precedence which she enjoys in the west. The next morning, they walked out to inspect the town, which was the metropolis of the Servian kingdom immediately before its overthrow by the Turks; and which, lying as it does in the midst of the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various

... had been invested by them with something of a halo of romance, founded chiefly on the seclusion In which it pleased Mrs. Whittredge to live. Bits of gossip let fall by their elders were eagerly treasured; it became the fashion, to rave over the beauty of the haughty Miss Genevieve, and even her brother who was not haughty, but quite like other people, ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard

... I could make no rejoinder. With a reverence unmingled with the taint of compassion, I took my departure, and being anxious by this time to know how my young charge was bearing her seclusion, I went to the room where I had left her, and ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green

... working for him, so that his procreation may be made possible. What? Are you too proud to be a teacher? Do you despise the thronging multitude of learners? Do you speak contemptuously of the teacher's calling? And, aping my mode of life, would you fain live in solitary seclusion, hostilely isolated from that multitude? Do you suppose that you can reach at one bound what I ultimately had to win for myself only after long and determined struggles, in order even to be able to live like a philosopher? ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche

... that we tolerate its bad manners only because they are better than no manners at all. But the university will always exist in some form as a community of persons desirous of pushing their culture to the highest pitch they are capable of, not as solitary students reading in seclusion, but as members of a body of individuals all pursuing culture, talking culture, thinking culture, above all, criticizing culture. If such persons are to read and talk and criticize to any purpose, they must know the world outside ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw

... Secure in the seclusion of his own woodshed, Marshal Crow slyly withdrew Jake's letter from an inside pocket and reread it with great care. Later on, having fortified himself with a substantial dinner, he returned to the hunt. Advising the toilers that he was ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon

... the second week of May, and since, in spite of continued fine weather, our unknown terror remained in the seclusion of his hiding-place, wherever it might be, I had persuaded Forrest to come with me for a run one afternoon as far as Cambridge, proposing to return ...
— The Motor Pirate • George Sidney Paternoster

... St. Erme; and he entered into a description of his sister's doings; her perfect content with their seclusion, and her influence over the dependants. So eager did he grow in his favourite subject, the welfare of his people, that he seemed to have forgotten what had brought him to Cadogan-place, and Theodora was convinced that though the being brought into ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge

... here, Sam began to shout for aid in every key possible to the human voice. Such hoots and howls, whistles and roars, never woke the echoes of the lonely marsh before, or scared the portly frog who resided there in calm seclusion. ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, September 1878, No. 11 • Various

... make himself amends for his two months' seclusion, shone forth with redoubled brilliancy. There is no such thing as carrying an umbrella on horseback, though those in the wagon were able to avail themselves of ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie

... my seclusion begins: I felt that Michael was right - my pretensions were ridiculous, I had nothing by which I could claim superiority, I was a hypocrite, I played an underhand game as well as they whom I ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden

... How could there be an active public opinion in the conditions of the times? Everybody was shut off from everybody else. Hear further what Mackenzie says in his History of the Nineteenth Century, referring to the end of last century: "The seclusion resulting from the absence of roads rendered it necessary that every little community, in some measure every family, should produce all that it required to consume. The peasant raised his own food; he grew his own flax or wool; his wife or daughter spun it; and a neighbour wove it ...
— A Hundred Years by Post - A Jubilee Retrospect • J. Wilson Hyde

... possession of the nunnery of the devout Abbess, and, without observing the same rigorous seclusion, according to the letter, seemed wellnigh to restore the apartments to the use to which they had been originally designed. The new inmates lived and took their meals apart from the rest of the family. ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott

... have reminded Gwenwyn, that the Cross which he had assumed on his shoulder, had consecrated his arm to the Holy War, and precluded his engaging in any civil strife. But the task was too dangerous for Father Einion's courage, and he shrunk from the hall to the seclusion of his own convent. Caradoc, whose brief hour of popularity was past, also retired, with humbled and dejected looks, and not without a glance of indignation at his triumphant rival, who had so judiciously reserved ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott

... feeling. If you become exhausted and dull, after the labors of the day, I would rather recommend taking the whole time in the morning. But by no means confine yourself to these stated seasons. Whenever the nature of your pursuits will admit of your seclusion for a sufficient length of time to fix your mind upon the truth, you may freely drink from this never-failing fountain ...
— A Practical Directory for Young Christian Females - Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister • Harvey Newcomb

... assumed after his death that in his declining years he lacked the attention of friends, and the little comforts and considerations that are due to old age. Yet this was not so; if the world heard little of him from the time of his final retirement into rural seclusion, and lost sight of him and believed him dead, it was his own choosing that they should remain in ignorance. He had had his day, a longer and fuller one than falls to the lot of most of the sons of men, and, when the weight of years ...
— George Borrow in East Anglia • William A. Dutt

... in west London could only give a lurid coppery tinge to the fog, to the eastern house-fronts, and to the great plane-trees holding the Square garden, like giants encamped. Landsowne House, in its lordly seclusion from the rest of the Square, seemed specially to have gathered the fog to itself, and was almost lost from sight. Not a ray of light escaped the closely-shuttered windows. The events of the mensis mirabilis ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... began to appear here and there in half-ruined chapels or parish churches to set up a furtive altar and say a mass, at peril if not of their lives at least of their liberty. When Knox returned to Edinburgh the Queen was at Lochleven, not then a prison but a cheerful seclusion, with the air blowing fresh from the pleasant loch, and the plains of Kinross and Fife all broad and peaceful before her, for the open-air exercises in which she delighted. She sent for Knox to this retirement ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant

... and feared this for a long time. They have, of course, never mentioned it in public. Shrewd French statesmen have long kept it in the seclusion of their own minds. It would be political and possibly physical death openly to assert that France is doomed. But doomed ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves

... whose appealing looks were perhaps the hardest of all pains for him to bear, devising fevered plans for the morrow, new histories, new comedies, all sorts of new literary schemes, flying from all these into seclusion, and out of seclusion into pleasure—at last, at five-and-forty, death seized him and closed his career.(183) I have been many a time in the chambers in the Temple which were his, and passed up the staircase, which ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray

... home, in the State of —, is a quiet little town, with little social life and less gayety. My mother, too, is a widow, who has lived in great seclusion ever since my father's death, which occurred when I was a little child. I have been her only companion in all these years of bereavement and sorrow, and it has never been her desire that I should indulge in any of the pleasures and gayeties that young people are fond of. From these causes ...
— Leah Mordecai • Mrs. Belle Kendrick Abbott

... successful brother had experienced a serious set-back. I had a grim feeling that the women, 'our women,' as he had called them, would feel it far more in their seclusion in Surbiton than he would in his seclusion in—wherever he was. My feelings, in fact, were so grim that Rosa was perplexed, but I told her how my mother was now dead and I had no one in the world save herself. But at times I thought of our affairs gloomily. It seemed a poor end to our parents' ...
— Aliens • William McFee

... and environment are often reflections of his character, it is always a matter of deep interest to get in touch with the surroundings of the creative or executive musician. To meet him away from the glare of the footlights, in the privacy and seclusion of the home, gives one a far more intimate knowledge of the artist as a man. Knowing how difficult it often is to obtain such an opportunity, I can be the more thankful that this privilege has been granted me many times, even with those artists who hold themselves most ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower

... escape if he remained in any portion of his native country (in which the authorities could lay hold of him), he continued his flight without intermission until he had buried himself in the intricacies and seclusion of the Hartz Mountains. Of course, all that I have now told you I learned afterwards. My oldest recollections are knit to a rude, yet comfortable cottage, in which I lived with my father, brother, and sister. It was on the confines of one of those vast forests which ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat

... had to give up hope he would feel obliged to return the envelope to the box from which he had taken it. Were its loss discovered he would of course be searched and kept in stricter seclusion ...
— A Cousin's Conspiracy - A Boy's Struggle for an Inheritance • Horatio Alger

... her head, but her policy of seclusion for Hinpoha was getting shaky. Mrs. Homer Evans was a power in the community, and what she did set the fashion in a good many directions. Aunt Phoebe was very anxious to keep her as a permanent acquaintance, and ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at School • Hildegard G. Frey

... in the seventeenth, and those of Diderot, Montesquieu, Helvetius. Locke, Hume, and Holbach in the eighteenth. Such will be your lot! Do now what you will, set type in a printing-office, bring up children, bury yourself in deep seclusion, seek obscure and lonely villages, it is all one to me; you cannot escape your destiny; you cannot divest yourself of your noblest feature, that active, strong, and inquiring mind, with which you are endowed; your place in the world ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon

... room; sought the seclusion of her own chamber; flung herself into a chair, and put the question to herself, "Am I in love ...
— The Young Trawler • R.M. Ballantyne

... other member of the family. The song ripples like a brook, floating down from the leafiest tree-tops. It is not much to look at, being quite plainly dressed in contrast with the red-eyed cousin, the largest of the Vireos. In nesting time it prefers seclusion, though in the spring and mid-summer, when the little ones have flown, and nesting cares have ceased, it frequents the garden, singing in the elms and birches, and other tall trees. It rambles as well through the foliage of trees in open woodland, in parks, and in those along the banks of streams, ...
— Birds Illustrated by Colour Photography, Vol II. No. 4, October, 1897 • Various

... at one side sits the presiding genius of the place, who rules very much as Jupiter was supposed to govern the earthly swarms, by letting things run and occasionally launching a thunderbolt. High up on one side, in an Olympian seclusion, away from the noise and the strife, sits a Board, calm as fate, and panoplied in the responsibility of chance, whose function seems to be that of switch-shifters in their windowed cubby at a network ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... prince and army. In this posture he was chastised with so many and such heavy blows from the clubs of two guards or executioners, that when Theodore commanded them to cease, the great logothete was scarcely able to rise and crawl away to his tent. After a seclusion of some days, he was recalled by a peremptory mandate to his seat in council; and so dead were the Greeks to the sense of honor and shame, that it is from the narrative of the sufferer himself that we acquire the knowledge of his disgrace. [7] The cruelty of the emperor was exasperated ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon

... the most enchanting bit of unlaced disheveled country within fifty miles of Boston, which, moreover, can be reached in half an hour's ride by railway. But the nearest railway station (Heaven be praised!) is two miles distant, and the seclusion is without a flaw. Ponkapog has one mail a day; two mails a day would render ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume III. (of X.) • Various

... went up from the orchestra stalls, mingled with many others. The seclusion and retirement in which he had taken refuge for the past few days had left him in ignorance of the public exasperation in his regard, the sermons, the dithyrambs with which the newspapers were filled on the subject of his corrupting wealth, articles ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet

... the necessity of feigning madness. The lady's honour required it from a brother; and a true lover, to convince the world, would embrace the project with alacrity. But there was no reason why the seclusion should be in a dungeon, or why exercise and air should be interdicted. This cruelty, and perhaps his uncertainty of Leonora's compassion, may well be imagined to have produced at last the malady he had feigned. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various

... in danger, for he possesses secrets which enable him constantly to interfere with their designs. By reason of this danger, he was obliged many years ago to retire from the rug business, and he has lived ever since in deep seclusion. It is your wish to ...
— The Old Tobacco Shop - A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure • William Bowen

... — N. seclusion, privacy; retirement; reclusion, recess; snugness &c. adj.; delitescence[obs3]; rustication, rus in urbe[Lat]; solitude; solitariness &c. (singleness) 87; isolation; loneliness &c. adj.; estrangement from the world, voluntary exile; aloofness. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget

... young ladies whose tall, graceful figure, rich, blooming complexion, and dark, glancing eye, would have distinguished her in any drawing-room—and another, whose gentle sweetness and cultivated taste made it a matter of universal regret that she was afterwards led to adopt the seclusion of a convent. ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie

... with his feet placidly reposing upon its window-sills. It is, indeed, in a new form. It no longer looks as it did to the early citizen of fifty years ago, driving out before breakfast upon the Bloomingdale Road, and surveying the calm river from the seclusion of Stryker's Bay. It had an indefinable road-side English air in those far-off mornings. The early citizen would not have been surprised had he heard the horn of the guard merrily winding, and beheld ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis

... a thing as supremely selfish self-denial. A man retires into the monk's pietic seclusion; he isolates himself from interest in the world battles; he shuts himself from sympathy with the struggles of business, civil, and even social life. To him these things are carnal. He is engrossed with the complication of interpretations ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope

... and Viotti retired to a small village called Schoenfeld, not far from Hamburg, where he lived in strict seclusion. During this time he was by no means idle, for he composed some of his finest works, notably the six duets for violins, which he prefaced by these words: "This book is the fruit of leisure afforded me by misfortune. Some of the pieces were dictated by trouble, others by hope." ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee

... brows' Unclouded noon of peace, there lies A leafy heaven of hazel boughs In the seclusion of her eyes; ...
— Silhouettes • Arthur Symons

... Here men's overcoats and hats were always in evidence, and there were thick hangings which deadened every sound. It seemed a place apart: on entering it you might have fancied yourself in a chapel, whose very air was thrilling with devotion, whose very silence and seclusion were fraught with mystery. ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola

... been living for a year in this seclusion when the merchant received a letter informing him that a ship on which he had some merchandise had just come safely home. The news nearly turned the heads of the two elder girls, for they thought that at last they would be able to quit their dull life in the country. ...
— Old-Time Stories • Charles Perrault

... what a blameless, diligent, and peaceful life they adorned the name of disciple through all the twelve years of their sojourn, how honored and beloved they were among the churches and in the University of Leyden, there are abundant testimonies. The twelve years of seclusion in an alien land among a people of strange language was not too long a discipline of preparation for that work for which the Head of the church had set them apart. This was the period of Robinson's activity as author. In erudite studies, ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon

... there being enough before him for a small family, and as his food was all brought in cooked from a neighboring restaurant, this eccentricity of his was well known, and gave an added eclat to his otherwise hermit-like habits. To my mind, it added an element of pathos to his seclusion, and so affected me that one day I ...
— The House in the Mist • Anna Katharine Green

... The last words of our dearest, spoken in the seclusion of the death-chamber to the tear-stained group gathered around, are not for all the world, and are recorded only to those whose love makes them able to appreciate. And what are these words that now begin to flow from the Master's lips, but ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer

... In the safe seclusion of her high-backed chair Emma McChesney smiled approvingly. Seventeen years ago, when her son had been born, and ten years ago, when she had got her divorce, Emma McChesney had thanked her God that her boy had not been a girl. Sometimes, now, she was not so sure ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber

... the seclusion of the smoking-room, and was already encircled by the clouds which float on the heaven of tobacco, when I heard a rustling of silk outside, and saw the smile of Mrs. Roylake beginning to captivate me ...
— The Guilty River • Wilkie Collins

... other on Asia, was influenced by her voluptuous climate in the choice of her marriage institutions; she received them from the East, where her philosophers, her legislators and her poets went to study the abstruse antiquities of Egypt and Chaldea. The absolute seclusion of women which was necessitated under the burning sun of Asia prevailed under the laws of Greece and Ionia. The women remained in confinement within the marbles of the gyneceum. The country was reduced to ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac

... a black-haired and a sturdy, boyish little figure in a great blue apron, perched on a stool before an easel, and on the other hand, Carmen had often been conscious of the fumes of a tobacco pipe penetrating her cloistered seclusion, and had seen across the passage, vaguely enveloped in the same nicotine cloud, an American Olympian, in a rocking chair, with his feet on the mantel shelf. They had once or twice met on the staircase, on which occasion Thatcher had greeted her with a ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte

... by his voluntary seclusion, Christophe decided to go out. But from the impression of his first evening he was instinctively in revolt against Paris. He had no desire to see anything: no curiosity: he was too much taken up with the problem of his own life to take any pleasure in watching the lives ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland

... order than those that concern merely the weal and woe of the individual, he administers them with sublime indifference amid the tumult of war, the bustle of business, or the raging of a plague—indeed, he pursues them into the seclusion of ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer

... surrounded by high walls and entered by a small wicket, the porter of which required a permit of admission before allowing ingress to the domain. I never remember seeing a single creature but ourselves in the complete seclusion of this deserted pleasaunce. It had grass and fine trees and winding walks, and little brooks fed by springs that glimmered in cradles of moss-grown, antiquated rock-work; no flowers or semblance of cultivation, but a general air of solitude and wildness ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble

... cases the obligation imposed by others should be void unless the patient should afterwards ratify it when in a sound state of mind. Penitents of this class might remain in their own houses, without seclusion within the walls of a monastery; but they were for ever compelled to wear the habit and shaven crown, to shun business and diversions, to lead exemplary and chaste lives: if single, they could not marry; if married, they could not enjoy ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 552, June 16, 1832 • Various

... their effect in largely breaking down the Chinese wall of seclusion and opening the empire more fully to foreign trade and intercourse, and also in compelling the emperor to receive foreign ambassadors at his court in Peking. In this the United States was among the most successful of the nations, ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall

... five long winters! and again I hear These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs With a sweet inland murmur.[4]—Once again Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs, Which on a wild secluded scene impress Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect The landscape with the quiet of the sky. The day is come when I again repose Here, under this dark sycamore, and view These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts, Which, at this season, with their unripe fruits, Among the woods and copses lose themselves, Nor, with ...
— Lyrical Ballads 1798 • Wordsworth and Coleridge

... peace the later Greeks are weaponless men, not surrounded by and entertaining throngs of armed retainers, like the Homeric chief. The women of later Greece, moreover, are in the background of life, dwelling in the women's chambers, behind those of the men, in seclusion. The Homeric women also, at least in the house of Odysseus, have their separate chambers, which the men seem not to enter except on invitation, though the ladies freely honour by their presence the hall of the warriors. The circumstances, however, were peculiar— Penelope being ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang

... several days, and even when it ceased masses of white vapour rose up from the neighbouring valleys and blotted out everything. The vapour had lifted, however, when Fasch and his sister started on their expedition, and Anna, tired of her week's seclusion, set out on a ramble. A strange new feeling came over the girl as soon as she lost sight of her aunt's straight figure. She was free, there would be no one to scold her or to make her feel awkward; she vaulted with delight, and ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various

... it, dear Mrs. Ralston," cooed Claire. "You will be as safe as safe in the seclusion of my sister's villa. And you can set things straight soon, when we have arrived. There can't be much to fear, can there, ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch

... and the beach is enlivened by an elegant, festive, ever-changing crowd, in which every language is heard and the beauty of every country is represented. A few steps distant from this gayety the misanthrope can find solitude and seclusion on the dunes, where the music faintly strikes his ear like a far-off echo, and the houses of the fishermen show him their lights, directing his thoughts to domestic ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis

... Parliament (July 7, 1483) condemned him and forfeited him in his absence. On July 22, 1484, he invaded Scotland with his ally, Douglas; they were routed at Lochmaben, Douglas was taken, and, by singular clemency, was merely placed in seclusion in the Monastery of Lindores, while Albany, escaping to France, perished in a tournament, leaving a descendant, who later, in the minority of James V., makes ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang

... outbreak, finally fixed forever the gulf between the two families. Judge Hampden was an ardent follower of Calhoun and "stumped" the State in behalf of Secession, whereas Major Drayton, as the cloud that had been gathering so long rolled nearer, emerged from his seclusion and became one of the sternest opponents of a step which he declared was not merely revolution, but actual rebellion. So earnest was he, that believing that slavery was the ultimate bone of contention, he emancipated his slaves on a system which he thought would secure their welfare. ...
— The Christmas Peace - 1908 • Thomas Nelson Page

... don't learn a blessed thing, Washington Hawkins, not a single blessed thing but showy rubbish and un-american pretentiousness. But send for the Lady Gwendolen—do; for I reckon the peerage regulations require that she must come home and let on to go into seclusion and mourn for those ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain



Words linked to "Seclusion" :   separation, privacy, seclude, privateness, reclusiveness, cocooning



Copyright © 2024 Diccionario ingles.com