"Recluse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... passions of the book-lover, which are not allotted to many. He had read hungrily, enjoying chiefly those magical draughts of prose which linger in the mind: Bacon, Sir Thomas Browne, Pater, Thoreau, Conrad. He was much of a recluse, a little saddened and sharpened perhaps by some of his experiences; and he loved, above all, those writers who can present truth with a faint tang of acid flavour, the gooseberry jam of literature as it were. One of my last satisfactions was to convert him (in some ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... was naturally glum, So she married young Grouch, the recluse; For she says when she's sad, she just looks at his face— Then she can't help but laugh like ...
— Why They Married • James Montgomery Flagg
... the ancient Sextum, a pretty village between six mountains, pop. 2600, and 2985 ft. above the sea-level. From Seez the road passes the village of Villard-Dessus, and then crosses the Recluse by a lofty bridge near an escarpment of gypsum, called the Roche Blanche, supposed to be the place noticed by Polybius, where Hannibal posted himself to protect his cavalry and beasts of burden. 3m. beyond is St. Germain; the last inhabited village ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... of my humiliation there emerged, full-grown, a huge respect for this quiet-eyed ex-schoolmaster who, for the few of us who knew him, lived the life of a studious recluse among his technical mechanisms in the laboratory. He was a salaried man, and I was one of his three employers. That he was able to ignore completely the business relation was a ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... the man on the grey horse. "And if you will allow me to offer you a cup of coffee, I shall be most pleased. You must excuse me, for I never take anything before midday. I am a recluse, have been for many years and rarely stir abroad. I do not intend to return to the world unless I can bring something with me worth having." A wistful smile twisted a little the ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... material, a sailor hat, tan gloves with big welts on the back and stout, low-heeled Oxfords. This was the young woman who had come five thousand miles to improve her health! This was the child of the Orient, and in the Orient, woman is a hothouse flower. This was the timid young recluse to whom the soft-spoken diplomats were to carry a few roses ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... thy country's hope thy fame extends: The rescued merchant oft thy words resounds: Thee and thy cause the rural hearth defends: His bowl to thee the grateful sailor crowns: The learn'd recluse, with awful zeal who read Of Grecian heroes, Roman patriots dead, Now with like awe doth living merit scan: While he, whom virtue in his bless'd retreat Bade social ease and public passions meet, Ascends the civil scene, and knows ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... to me how absolutely absorbed I had become in the Martian investigation. Ordinarily a sociable person, in the past week I had become a recluse. College friends that I had seen almost daily since my return to Paris, I now completely neglected, even shunned, lest they should call at my rooms some evening when I was in wave contact with Mars. It also occurred to me that, as surely ...
— Zarlah the Martian • R. Norman Grisewood
... in the village. Some of it was very hard for a wife to bear, and she resented it indignantly; yet never received a word from father with which to refute it. At this time, as nearly as I can judge, she was a recluse, and subject to periods of profound melancholy, but nothing worse. Then she took that winter journey to her sister's deathbed, brought home the boy, and, hastened by exposure and chill and grief, I suppose, her mind gave way,—that's ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... not be supposed that Lady Eustace, during these summer weeks, was living the life of a recluse. The London season was in its full splendour, and she was by no means a recluse. During the first year of her widowhood she had been every inch a widow,—as far as crape would go, and a quiet life either at ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... passes the open door, and we can hear the breathing of the corpulent recluse. As soon as he has carried away the enormous overcoat that sheathes him, like the hide of a pachyderm, and is disappearing, Brisbille begins to roar, "What a snout! Did you see it, eh? Did you see the jaws he swings from his ears, eh? The exact ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... World—that is, if you do not disdain the company of strolling players. You gain in knowledge what you lose in time. If you are a philosopher, you can study human nature through the buffoon and the mummer. If you are a naturalist, here are grand forests to contemplate. If you are not a recluse, here is free, ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... studied human nature so superficially as to fail to comprehend the snares and pitfalls which men's egregious vanity sometimes spring prematurely; and rumour quotes me aright, in proclaiming me a recluse when the curtain falls and the lights are extinguished. To-day I deviated from my usual custom in compliment to the representative of my country, who sends you—so his card reads—'charged with an explanation of his unavoidable absence.' As minister-extraordinary, ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... This gave him a freedom among men, a sense of belonging anywhere, and singled him out from the rest. It gave him, too, the joy of expression—the joy of throwing out his thought and getting its immediate reaction in other lives. Yet he understood perfectly the man who seemed shy and recluse, who was choked-off before strangers, and who yet burned to be a democrat, to give and take, to share alien lives, to be of the moving throng of life. Such a man was the victim either of a wrong education, an education of repression that discouraged any personal display, ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... further from him. All I could gather was that the Trewinions had been a great people, but had fallen on evil days as the result of their own sinning, and that the present representative of the family was a recluse, living alone in the old Manor House, and that many curious ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... we see her speaking, for the first time beyond perfunctory salutations, with the captain, a taciturn recluse of a man, furious just now at some unexpected litigation connected with his cargo and horribly inconvenienced by the loss of his stewardess. Two ladies waiting, literally, on the wharf, have been promised accommodation ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... that make this shy and furtive Recluse, this Wanderer in the shadow, the greatest of critics? Imagination, in the first place, and then that rare, unusual, divine gift of limitless Reverence for the Human Senses. Imagination has a two-fold power. ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... as I told you, was solitary and retired; my time chiefly passed in writing out documentary matters for the lawyers. The circumstance of my using the pen so incessantly became known, and I was looked on as a literary recluse. One day a lady personally unknown to me, but whose indefatigable zeal was always seeking the good of others, sent me a parcel of tracts. With equal wonder and delight I opened one of them, a simple, spiritual little production; ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... was more fortunate in 1768, when it again became vacant; but he held it as a sinecure, doing none of its duties. He died in 1770, on the 3d of July, of gout in the stomach. His habits were those of a recluse; and whether we agree or not, with Adam Smith, in saying that nothing is wanting to render him perhaps the first poet in the English language, but to have written a little more, it is astonishing that so great and permanent a reputation should have ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... receiving, from each of the embayed windows in succession, a flush of morning sun; and Otto looked so gay, and walked so airily, he was so well dressed and brushed and frizzled, so point-device, and of such a sovereign elegance, that the heart of his cousin the recluse was ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the farm of Hubert To where Mabel's castle stood, Closed in, a league on all sides. With wall'd parks and wealthy wood, No chance glimpse could be look'd for, So recluse her widowhood. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... great promise, destined to become distinguished. But the years slipped by, and his literary performance, consisting of desultory essays and several slight volumes of verse, was not enough to justify the prophecy. His life more and more became that of a bachelor recluse and valetudinarian. When he died, in 1881, at sixty years of age, after much suffering heroically borne, as pathetic entries in the last leaves of his Diary remain to show, there was a feeling that here was "one more faithful failure." But the quiet, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... which has not often been held by men gifted with his peculiar genius — that of a county member. The contest between the Dukes of Gloucester and Lancaster, and their adherents, for the control of the Government, was coming to a crisis; and when the recluse and studious Chaucer was induced to offer himself to the electors of Kent as one of the knights of their shire — where presumably he held property — we may suppose that it was with the view of supporting his patron's ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... his cell and read. The gentle stillness of a rare spring morning enveloped him with its benison. And the clear light fell upon the large pages of a book in his hand,—the window through which it streamed was the one link between the young recluse and the life of the world. From it he could see the roofs of the city beneath him; when he so wished, he might, without straining his gaze, distinguish the Pantheon at the end of that triumphal avenue which spanned ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... I fancied it was the Frog. From the ardour of my greediness I closed my teeth upon it, and the child died on the spot. The holy man discovered the fact, and from regret for his son, attacked me, and I, turning toward the open country, fled with speed, and the recluse pursued me and cursed me, and said: 'I desire of my Creator that He will make thee base and powerless, and cause thee to be the vehicle of the Frog-king. And, verily, thou shalt not have power to eat Frogs, save what their King shall bestow on thee as alms.' And now, ...
— The Talking Beasts • Various
... that between these two men, so different in outward fates,—between "the adored, the incomparable Nelson" and the homely poet, "retired as noontide dew,"—there was a moral likeness so profound that the ideal of the recluse was realized in the public life of the hero, and, on the other hand, the hero himself is only seen as completely heroic when his impetuous life stands out for us from the solemn background of the poet's calm. And surely these two natures taken together make the ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... next proceeded to give me his advice upon my future conduct and pursuits in the university; remarked that his old friend, my father, could not have selected a more unfortunate person to usher me into notice: that his habits were those of a recluse, and his associations confined almost within the walls of his own college; but that his good wishes for the son of an old friend and schoolfellow would, on this occasion, induce him to present me, in person, to the principal of Brazennose, of whom he took occasion to speak in the highest possible ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... and Cecile Shepard Mr. Northrup appeared very well indeed at dinner that night in the Corner House. They learned he could be very entertaining if he wished; that he had not forgotten how to interest women if he had been a recluse for so long; and that even Tess and Dot found something about him to admire. The former said afterward that Mr. Northrup had a voice like a distant drum; Dot said he had a "noble looking forehead," meaning that it was very ...
— The Corner House Girls Growing Up - What Happened First, What Came Next. And How It Ended • Grace Brooks Hill
... favour from the number of great men who have been convinced of its truth, after a serious consideration of the question. Grotius was an acute man, a lawyer, a man accustomed to examine evidence, and he was convinced. Grotius was not a recluse, but a man of the world, who certainly had no bias to the side of religion. Sir Isaac Newton set out an infidel, and came to be ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... next quest he found himself again opposed by his London friends. Unable to secure a new Alice in Wonderland for his child readers, he determined to give them Kate Greenaway. But here he had selected another recluse. Everybody discouraged him. The artist never saw visitors, he was told, and she particularly shunned editors and publishers. Her own publishers confessed that Miss Greenaway was inaccessible to them. "We conduct all our business with her by correspondence. I have never seen her personally ...
— A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward Bok
... of George's uncle, who was a recluse living at Tunbridge. He was a scholar and a pedant, and concerned himself but little about his only child, whose fortune was inherited from ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... a recluse Mr. Fenton had spent the years of his middle age. He was under the impression that he was not sympathetic with most people and that they did not care for him. With a sufficient fortune for his needs, he had not found ...
— The Girl Scouts in Beechwood Forest • Margaret Vandercook
... order, comparable to Beethoven's Coriolanus, i.e., the themes are dramatic characterizations: the first typifying the stormy nature of Manfred; the second, with its note of pleading, the mysterious influence over the recluse of the spirit of Astarte. As in all works of this kind the music cannot be readily appreciated without a knowledge of the poem which it illustrates.[193] As for the structure, Schumann clings too closely to the Sonata-form. The music is eloquent just in proportion as he gives ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... Lenide, stimulated by similar suggestions, had conceived a great wish to meet the marquise; for, having got M. de Nocheres who no doubt regretted her prolonged retreat—to entrust him with a commission for his granddaughter, he came to the convent parlour and asked for the fair recluse. She, although she had never seen him, recognised him at the first glance; for having never seen so handsome a cavalier as he who now presented himself before her, she thought this could be no other than the Marquis de Ganges, of whom ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE GANGES—1657 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... circumstances a number of fragments of the Royal Archives of Memphis have been preserved from destruction with the rest, containing petitions written on papyrus in the Greek language; these were composed by a recluse of Macedonian birth, living in the Serapeum, in behalf of two sisters, twins, who served the god as "Pourers ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... education was as yet in its infancy. This was not only his first visit to England, but, indeed, to any spot further afield than Interlaken. All of his six-and-twenty years that he could recollect had been passed in a chalet on the Scheidegg above Grindelwald, his only companion an elderly recluse who had deliberately cut himself off from communion with his fellows. The trouble which had driven Mr. Strange, an author at one time of some mark, into this seclusion, was now as completely forgotten as his name. Even David knew nothing of its cause. That Strange was his uncle ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... then her heart began to beat again with some interest in life. There was one friend, almost her only friend—for she now repelled nearly every one who approached her—who never failed in hopeful, comforting, stimulating words and offices, who visited her frequently in her recluse life at Ivy Cliff, and sought with untiring assiduity to win her once more away from its dead seclusion. And she was at last successful. In the winter after Mr. Delancy's death, Irene, after much earnest persuasion, consented to pass a few weeks in the city ...
— After the Storm • T. S. Arthur
... most memorable men who have done honour to modern times. He combined the discharge of the most important duties of active and public life with the attainment of that exact and various learning which is generally the portion only of the recluse student. He was distinguished as an advocate and a magistrate, and he composed the most valuable works on the law of his own country; he was almost equally celebrated as an historian, a scholar, a poet, and a divine; a disinterested statesman, a philosophical lawyer, a patriot who ...
— A Discourse on the Study of the Law of Nature and Nations • James Mackintosh
... died before him. In like manner the dominion of South Wales descended to Rhys son of Gruffyd, owing to the death of several of his brothers. During the childhood of Richard, a holy man, named Caradoc, led a pious and recluse life at St. Ismael, in the province of Ros, {107} to whom the boy was often sent by his parents with provisions, and he so ingratiated himself in the eyes of the good man, that he very often promised him, together with his blessing, the portion of all his brothers, and the paternal inheritance. It ...
— The Itinerary of Archibishop Baldwin through Wales • Giraldus Cambrensis
... differ quite as much as our bodily appearance. There is no uniformity in the spiritual sphere;—this we know from its manifestations in conduct and history. One man is heroic and another tender, one a reformer and another a recluse, one conservative and another radical. The same Bible has passages as widely contrasted as the twenty-third and the fifty-eighth Psalms, and characters as unlike as Jacob and Jesus. Indeed, may it not be assumed that physical differences are but expressions of still more clearly marked differences ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... Act Congress, or when Princess Anne was not half a century old, the old church had taken its stand, backed up to the town, recluse from its gossip. Between its tall round doors, with little window-panes like spectacles let into their panels, the ivy vine arose in form like the print of The Crucified, reaching out its stems and tendrils wide of the one glorified window in the gable, ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... latter, however, was boarded up—nobody could remember a time when it was not. And none knew why it was so closed; certainly not because of the occupant's dislike of light and air, for on those rare occasions when a hunter had passed that lonely spot the recluse had commonly been seen sunning himself on his doorstep if heaven had provided sunshine for his need. I fancy there are few persons living to-day who ever knew the secret of that window, but I am one, as you ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... My Lord, I will put it with a convincing brevity, not indeed a dust-scattering brevity fit only for the mumbling recluse, who perchance in this grey London marching Eastward at break of naked morn, daintily protruding a pinkest foot out of compassing clouds, copiously takes inside of him doses of what is denied to his external bat-resembling vision, but with the sharp brevity of a rotifer astir in that curative ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 19, 1891 • Various
... ministers, he had the least occasion for an outfit, and I suppose spent almost nothing on that article. He was of a disposition, too, to restrain himself within any limits of expense whatever, and it suited his recluse turn, which is, to avoid society. Should he judge of what others should do, by what he did, it would be an improper criterion. He was in Europe as a voyageur only, and it was while the salary was five hundred guineas more ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... extraordinarily young; she was inevitably romantic. Living what amounted to the life of a recluse, it was only to be expected that she should live her illusions and dreams. Her mind was a storehouse of folklore, romance, poetry and religion; her rationalistic readings had not in any way become part of her, though facts and ratiocinations, by mere feat of memory, were stored in her mind ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... was toying with the idea of becoming a recluse, of living in some hushed retreat where the turmoil of life would be muffled—as in those streets covered with straw to prevent any sound from ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... by the news of the warlike preparations of Servia and Greece, Abdul Hamid looked on Russia's advice in a contrary sense as a piece of Muscovite treachery. About the same time, too, there were rumours of palace plots at Constantinople; and the capricious recluse of Yildiz finally decided to keep his best troops near at hand. It appears, then, that Nihilism in Russia and the spectre of conspiracy always haunting the brain of Abdul Hamid played their part in ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... it for all other human nature, save my father's, not to breathe an indignant anathema on the scheming head of the brother-in-law who had thus violated the most sacred obligations of trust and kindred, and so entangled an unsuspecting recluse. But, to give even Jack Tibbets his due, he had firmly convinced himself that "The Capitalist" would make my father's fortune; and if he did not announce to him the strange and anomalous development into which ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... hardest part of the task she had assigned herself was done. To acquaint Bruce's father with Sprudell's plot and enlist him on Bruce's side seemed altogether the easiest part of her plan. She had no notion that she was the brilliant lady-journalist to whom the diplomat, the recluse, the stern and rock-bound capitalist, give up the secrets of their souls, but she did have an assured feeling that with the arguments she had to offer ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... by nature, it is difficult to say. I think they were all easterners, and this would explain away certain characteristic shynesses of temper and of expression in them. Ryder, as we know, was the typical recluse, Fuller in all likelihood also. Martin I know little of privately, but his portrait shows him to be a strong elemental nature, with little feeling for, or interest in, the superficialities either of life or of art. Of Blakelock I can say ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... hands together. Conviction as positive as certainty thrilled along every nerve. Mr. Richards, the recluse, was the midnight walker—Mr. Richards, who was no invalid at all; and who, shut up all day, came out in the dead of night, when the household were asleep, to take the air in the grounds. There, in the solemn hush of her room, Rose's thoughtless words came ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... outside affairs and in his view of the world that lay outside the windows of his mind that Townsend found life a thing of odd discoveries, strange secrets, and thrilling hazards. His own existence, though in reality an exceedingly quiet one, indeed almost that of a recluse, was still to him a great adventure. There was always for him the possibility of the sudden appearance of the man in the black cloak with hat drawn over his brows, either looking, or saying "Beware!" I remember ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... "bloody Mary." Knowing her Spanish parentage, we can better understand why she was such an ardent Roman Catholic. Strange that one so loyal to the forms of her religion should have been the innocent cause of the English Reformation! The injured queen, divorced, remained in England, a religious recluse, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... offended his new companions. Hay did not return more than twice, Pringle never at all, and there came a time when Archie even desisted from the Tuesday Club, and became in all things - what he had had the name of almost from the first - the Recluse of Hermiston. High-nosed Miss Pringle of Drumanno and high-stepping Miss Marshall of the Mains were understood to have had a difference of opinion about him the day after the ball - he was none the wiser, ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the appropriate epitaph for the tombstone of many an author; and if we look carefully into his history we shall find an answer to the question: "All but what?" We shall find, perhaps, that he is a recluse, that his social nature is not fed at all, and that be is, of course, unsympathetic. This is a very frequent cause of dissatisfaction with an author, as it always gives a morbid tinge to his writings. Dickens is eminently ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... analyse subtleties of emotion. Intellectuality had no part in her; most people's talk was for her meaningless, and she had not the patience to listen to any conversation that rose above the food and business of the day. She was confused and bewildered by everything the strange recluse on the hill said to her,—she could not follow him at all,—and yet, the purely physical attraction he exercised over her nature drew her to him like a magnet and kept her in a state of feverish craving for a love she knew she could never win. She would have ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... O'er my nocturnal hours breath'd new delight; Made me exult in labour, plann'd for you! Its progress from your inspiration grew: The toil was sweet, that your approvance cheer'd; For what your love inspir'd, that love endear'd. Nor unregarded by the fair, and great, Was your recluse in this sequester'd state; When I began, by just records, to prove How Cowper merited our country's love; The loveliest regent of poetic taste; First of the fair; with all attractions grac'd! Friend of the muses! and herself a muse! Her bright eyes dimm'd with sorrow's sacred dews, ...
— Poems on Serious and Sacred Subjects - Printed only as Private Tokens of Regard, for the Particular - Friends of the Author • William Hayley
... the desolation, the sombre surroundings, the risks to be run every hour—every second—and you will understand that those two English gentlemen had something in them passing self-interest, passing all that the world has to offer. Ferrier never dreamed of becoming a nautical recluse; he was too full of the joy of life for that: but he had a purpose, and he went right at his mark like a bullet from a rifle. Once that evening he went on deck and tried to peer through the wall of trembling darkness that surrounded ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... changed was the soul of the young recluse and mystic. The consciousness of God had vanished from it; the visions of the spiritual world no longer visited it; he ceased to pray in secret, and the petitions which he offered at the family altar were so dull and spiritless as even to excite the observation ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... his property, if he thought fit to claim her, by virtue of the marriage already had; but it was a present supply of her necessary wants, by which he acknowledged her as his wife, and engaged to furnish her with alimony, not ample indeed, but suitable to the recluse life which he prescribed ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 51, October 19, 1850 • Various
... four dollars. How much better to exhibit the stoic tenacity of all great men, go back to my hall bedroom (which I was temporarily occupying) and concentrate on matters in hand. What right, I said, has a Buddhist recluse, born either in 1281 or 1283, to harass me so? But I knew in my heart that the matter was already decided. I walked back to the corner of Hallbedroom street, and stood vacillating at the newsstand, pretending to glance over the papers. But across six centuries the insistent ghost of Kenko had ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... a recluse, a dreamer, a kind of isolated philosopher, easy-going, content with but little, harboring ill-feeling against no man, and without even having a grudge against heaven. I have constantly lived alone, consequently, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... shone out, and a bearded shadow towered and dwindled upon a white blind. Uniacke, a bachelor, and now almost of necessity a recluse, entertained for the present a visitor. Remembering the substance of the shadow he opened the churchyard gate, threaded his way among the gravestones, and was quickly at the Vicarage door. As he passed within, a yellow glow of lamplight and of firelight streamed into the ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... found him, a year later, they prevailed on him to go to Oxford; and, for the next four years, he lived the life of a recluse ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... locks, and, taking off his ornaments, sends them and the horse back in charge of the unwilling Channa to Kapilavastu. The next seven days were spent alone in a grove of mango trees [v.04 p.0684] near by, whence the recluse walks on to Rajagriha, the capital of Magadha, and residence of Bimbisara, one of the then most powerful rulers in the valley of the Ganges. He was favourably received by the raja; but though asked to do so, he would not as yet assume the responsibilities of a teacher. He attached himself ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... requires a fund of good-nature like yours not to grow morose. Company keeps our rind from growing too coarse and rough; and though at my return I design not to mix in public, I do not intend to be quite a recluse. My absence will put it in my power to take up or drop as much as I please. Adieu! I shall inquire about your commission of books, but having been arrived but ten days, have not yet had time. Need I say?—no I need not—that nobody can be ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... the same plane as those of 1843. It might also be cited as another proof not only of De Quincey's very keen interest in all the leading questions of the time, but as an illustration of the John Bull warmth and heat which he, the dreamer, the recluse, the lover of abstract problems, could bring into such discussions. Here, at all events, his views were definite enough, and stated with a bold precision of English plainness that would have pleased the most pronouncedly Tory or Unionist ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... neighbourhood of Llangollen Vale, and having heard much of Lady E. Butler and Miss Ponsonby, felt a desire to see and converse with them. But how he could obtain this pleasure (as the ladies seldom or never saw company, and were fond of a recluse life) was the question. At length he bethought himself of a method the most likely to answer the purpose, without the appearance of forwardness or indelicacy. He sent his servant with the following ...
— The "Ladies of Llangollen" • John Hicklin
... the house himself and had lived in it with an old servant for about ten years. His practice, never very extensive, had after a few years been given up entirely. Not only so, but he had withdrawn himself almost altogether from social life and become a recluse. I was told by the village doctor, about the only person with whom he held any relations, that during his retirement he had devoted himself to a single line of study, the result of which he had expounded in a book that did not commend itself ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... their neighbors' affairs, and when private life will soon be a thing of the past, so bold and so intrusive are the eyes of the press,—that modern Argus. Nevertheless, it is a truth which rests on the authority of the first six Christian centuries, during which no recluse ever returned to social life. Few are the moral wounds that ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... icy, midnight moonbeams of the recluse of Christ's College! How preciously golden seem the links of our universal brotherhood, when the Fates are waving their dark wings around us, and menace us with their sundering! I am not sure, my worthy Wagonero, that, rather than see my own little cord finally cut, I would not consent to be ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... all instruments, and although on account of its nature it is excluded from the concert hall, it is the companion of the recluse. The latter says to himself: 'Here I can produce the feelings of my heart, can shade fully, drive away care, and melt away a tone through all its swellings,'" ...
— How the Piano Came to Be • Ellye Howell Glover
... the property, a genial recluse, Mr. Robinson Cruse, who for eight years had led an almost solitary life, his nearest neighbor on the island being the sergeant in charge of Fort Gaines, which officer, I was informed, was seldom seen outside of his dismal enclosure. Solitude, however, did not seem to have had the usual ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... vulgar prejudices, permitted the visits of the hero of my story. Still he did not altogether encourage the affection which he found springing up between Mary and the poet. When, however, he found that her affections were engaged, he did not withhold his consent from her marriage, and the recluse bore to his solitary mansion the young bride of his affections. O sir, the house assumed a new appearance within and without. Roses bloomed in the garden, jessamines peeped through its lattices, and the fields about it smiled with the effects of careful cultivation. Lights were seen in the ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... hear his angry voice pealing in every corner! It was a good room for echoes; and he could speak loudly if he chose. Come away! there is a door I always use that leads to my private apartments. I am no recluse; but in these moods I do not care to show myself to people. If you are not afraid, you may come with me, unless you prefer ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... viewed it with feelings of great devotion, had worn at her neck while a girl, and which, after she became a mother, she had placed round her child's. It had even happened, that being, while pregnant, abandoned by all the world, and constantly occupied in contemplating the image of this benevolent recluse, her offspring had contracted some resemblance to this revered object. She therefore bestowed upon him the name of Paul, giving him for his patron a saint who had passed his life far from mankind by whom he had been first deceived and then forsaken. Virginia, on receiving this little present ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... its heroine a little French girl brought up in an old chateau in Normandy by an aunt who is a recluse and devote. A child of this type transplanted suddenly to the realistic atmosphere of New York must inevitably have much to suffer. The quaint little figure blindly trying to guess the riddle of duty under these unfamiliar conditions ...
— Sara Crewe - or, What Happened at Miss Minchin's • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... has been in history a height without sustaining breadth, a needle, not a cube. Genius has been tremulous, recluse,—has been cherished in solitude with Nature,—has been a feminine partiality among men, holding for gods its favorites, for dogs the refuse of mankind. It still counts the practical life an interruption. It is therefore ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... dressed in rough garb—belted woolen jacket, trousers awkwardly patched, leggings rolled above the knee, and yellow moccasins. Although he was the ordinary type of the woods recluse, there was kindliness in his expression, as well as a benignant gleam in his eye that ...
— The Rainy Day Railroad War • Holman Day
... "I have prepared a letter of introduction for you to one of our Order known as Elzear of Melyana,—he is a recluse, and his hermitage is situated close to the Babylonian ruins. You will find rest and shelter there after the fatigues of travel. I have also traced out a map of the district, and the exact position of the field you seek, ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... appetencies just, Produce a formative prolific dust; With apt propensities, the Styles recluse Secrete a formative prolific juice; These in the pericarp erewhile arrive, Rush to each other, and embrace alive. —Form'd by new powers progressive parts succeed, Join in one whole, ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... unpleasantly agitated by the interest he excited, in spite of his astonishment at a public discussion of the matter in this house, "I am in the dark. Her father should know, but I do not. Her door is locked to me; I have not seen her. I am absolutely in the dark. I am a recluse. I have forgotten the ways of the world. I should have supposed her father would ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... went out, I saw her husband. (I'll tell you, in strict confidence, that her husband is Professor Spence. They are well known people here. He used to be a sort of recluse. A queer chap. Deep as a judge.) Well, I saw him pass, on the opposite side of the road. He saw her and was just going to call, when it seemed to strike him where she had come from. I couldn't see very well across the road, but he looked ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... reason to dread a fair outside, to mistrust a popular bearing, to shudder before distinction, grace, and courtesy. Beauty and affability had come in my way when I was recluse, desolate, young, and ignorant—a toil-worn governess perishing of uncheered labour, breaking down before her time. These, Caroline, when they smiled on me, I mistook for angels. I followed them home; and when into their hands I had given without reserve my whole chance of future happiness, ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... fates overtakes the obscure professional scholar in this country: either he shrinks to the dimensions of a true villager and deserts the vastness of his library; or he repudiates the village and becomes a cosmopolitan recluse—lonely toiler among his books. Few possess the breadth and equipoise which will enable them to pass from day to day along mental paths, which have the Forum of Augustus or the Groves of the Academy at one end and the babbling square of a modern town at the ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... instant of even less importance. I recollect the news coming. The King, having been always in frail health, had never married; seeing clearly but not far, he was a sad man: the fate that struck down his brother increased his natural melancholy; he became almost a recluse, withdrew himself from the capital to a retired residence, and henceforward was little more than a name in which Prince von Hammerfeldt conducted the business of the country. Now and then my mother visited him; once she brought back to me a letter from ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... attention, as with his tall, slender, majestic figure he moved through the village, or paced the beach, or impelled his frail boat. But speculation as to who he was or what had induced him to become a recluse had about ceased from the despair of obtaining any ...
— Robert Coverdale's Struggle - Or, On The Wave Of Success • Horatio, Jr. Alger
... "The vihara," says Hardy, "is the residence of a recluse or priest;" and so Davids:—"the clean little hut where the mendicant lives." Our author, however, does not use the Indian name here, but the Chinese characters which express its meaning—tsing ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... writers—Walpole, Gray, Byron, Scott, FitzGerald, and a long list. But nearly all these men were men of affairs, of action. Given a good literary style they could hardly have been other than interesting, they had so much to say that they gained from external sources. Even FitzGerald—the one recluse—had all the treasures of literature constantly passing into his study. Cowper had but eighteen books altogether during many of his years in Olney, and some of us who have lent our volumes in the ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... person he gave himself to others reluctantly; he was, in truth, a recluse. He stood for character more than for intellect, and for intuition more than for reason. He was often contrary and inconsistent. There was more crust than crumb in the loaf he ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... I love to meditate, as I watch the sunset; it suits a recluse like me. And there, a little farther off, I have planted some of the trees beloved ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... mind diseased, No ear have I to hear, no heart to heed The words of wisdom that might serve my need, Frown on my doctors, with the friends am wroth Who fain would rouse me from my fatal sloth, Seek what has harmed me, shun what looks of use, Town-bird at Tibur, and at Rome recluse. Then ask him how his health is, how he fares, How prospers with the prince and his confreres. If he says Well, first tell him you rejoice, Then add one little hint (but drop your voice), "As Celsus bears his fortune well or ill, So bear with Celsus ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... vicar. "A man. If I remember rightly, his name was Madley; an artist. He was a great recluse; seldom went out of the place, and—" the vicar hesitated and then broke into a little gush of candour "—and since you appear to have come for this information, and since it is better that the truth should be told than that garbled versions should get about, ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... that he had a brother who was a monk, or rather hermit, who lived a life of reading, meditation and prayer, in a solitary place not far from Falaise. Arlotte's father sent immediately to this religious recluse for his spiritual counsel. The monk replied that it was right to comply with the wishes of so great a man, whatever they might be. The tanner, thus relieved of all conscientious scruples on the subject by this high religious ...
— William the Conqueror - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... should make a retreat of some days together, at Camaldoli, in order to give his body some rest, which was borne down by fatigue, and relax his mind from the various cares which oppressed it. He willingly assented to this, because he liked the life of a recluse. They, therefore, went to this holy solitude, and they remained there nearly a month, solely employed in meditation on heavenly things. The cardinal took a cell at the entry of the desert where it is still to be ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... horseman at length, in a low deep tone, "you have chosen to shut yourself up in a narrow cell, like a recluse, for more than two months, denying yourself all sort of enjoyment, practising severest abstinence, and passing your whole time in useless prayer—ay, useless, for if you were to pray from now till doomsday—come ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... of mind in the recluse when an incident occurred, that gradually seemed to accomplish a completion of his prophecy. This incident was a visit from an old ecclesiastical acquaintance, attended by two young ladies, Mary and Harriet Welford, daughters of an aged and retired ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... write at 'large leisure in noble mornings, opened by prayer or by readings of Plato, or whatsoever else is dearest to the Morning Muse.' Yet he could not wholly escape the recluse's malady. He confesses that he sometimes craves 'that stimulation which every capricious, languid, and languescent study needs.' Carlyle's potent concentration stirs his envy. The work of the garden and the orchard he found very fascinating, eating up days and weeks; 'nay, a brave scholar ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... the professor. "I opened those letters, Wigan. Of course Zena's first question on her arrival was why Mr. Parrish had not opened them. Her second question was: Why did he live the life of a recluse in Gray's Inn? How would you ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... Montmartre. Jacques remained pensively at his window listening to the winged chorus of spring harmony which added to his sadness. Seeing a raven fly by uttering a croak, he thought of the days when ravens brought food to Elijah, the pious recluse, and reflected that these birds were no longer so charitable. Then, not being able to stand it any longer, he closed his window, drew the curtain, and, as he had not the wherewithal to buy oil for his lamp, lit a resin taper that he had brought back from a trip to ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... entertainments given by members of the noble families of Stanley and Egerton, they show that Milton's plan of life did not involve cutting himself off from the great world, where they must have caused his name to be talked of. His life at Horton was evidently not that of a mere recluse, {42} forgetting the world outside and forgotten by it. Arcades and Comus, and still more the wonderful outburst At a Solemn Music, are visible links with the cultivated circles of the town, as Lycidas, which followed them in 1637 and was printed in 1638 at Cambridge ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... conscious that he leads two lives, the one trivial and ordinary, the other sacred and recluse; the one which he carries to the dinner-table and to his daily work, which grows old with his body and dies with it, the other that which is made up of the few inspiring moments of his higher aspiration and attainment, and in which his youth survives for him, his dreams, ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... morning, he was every day visible to the crew; either standing in his pivot-hole, or seated upon an ivory stool he had; or heavily walking the deck. As the sky grew less gloomy; indeed, began to grow a little genial, he became still less and less a recluse; as if, when the ship had sailed from home, nothing but the dead wintry bleakness of the sea had then kept him so secluded. And, by and by, it came to pass, that he was almost continually in the air; but, as yet, for all that he said, or perceptibly did, on the at last sunny deck, he seemed as unnecessary ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... resemblance to that of the celebrated Pope. He had a fondness for poetry, and was not destitute of taste. His manners were expressive of a tenderness and benevolence, the demonstrations of which appeared to have been somewhat too artificially cultivated. His habits were those of a perfect recluse. He seldom went out of his drawing-room, and he showed to a friend of Mary a pair of shoes, which had served him, he said, for fourteen years. Mary frequently spent days and weeks together, at the house ...
— Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman • William Godwin
... of the world, I dragged on a miserable existence for some time, in a secluded situation on the shores of Cornwall; but, by degrees, the monotony of my sedentary and recluse life wearied me. I began to associate with the poor fishermen around me, and, in a short time, became enthusiastically fond of their perilous and exciting mode of life. The sea became to me quite a 'passion'—my mind had found a new channel for its energies; and when, a ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... is extremely well-housed, after having roamed like a Tartar about the country with his whole personal estate at his heels. . There is an extensive view, which is called pretty: but Northamptonshire is no county to please me. What entertained me was, that he who in London -,vas grown an absolute recluse, is over head and ears in neighbours, and as popular as if he intended to stand for the county, instead of having given up the town. The very first morning after my arrival, as we were getting into the chaise to go to Wroxton, they ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... this coppice, not far from the eastern or more remote end of the island, Legrand had built himself a small hut, which he occupied when I first, by mere accident, made his acquaintance. This soon ripened into, friendship—for there was much in the recluse to excite interest and esteem. I found him well educated, with unusual powers of mind, but infected with misanthropy, and subject to perverse moods of alternate enthusiasm and melancholy. He had with him many books, but rarely employed them. His chief ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... to the foothills, going now slower, and evidently fatigued, if not frightened half to death. Nothing is so appalling to a recluse as half a mile of summer boarders. As the deer entered the thin woods, she saw a rabble of people start across the meadow in pursuit. By this time, the dogs, panting, and lolling out their tongues, came swinging along, keeping the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner |
