"Seclusion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to be otherwise with the later English Romantic poets. They lived and worked at a time when the whole atmosphere and even the paraphernalia of literary composition had just undergone a considerable change. After a period of comparative seclusion and self- concentration, England at the Peace of Amiens once more found its way to Europe—and vice versa. And from our point of view this widening of prospects is especially noticeable. For the classical revival in Romanticism appears to ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... day-dream left her no wiser than that? The Schnorrer's daughter setting her cap at the wealthy Oxford man, forsooth! What would people say? And what would they say if they knew how she had sought him out in his busy seclusion to pitch a tale of woe and move him by his tenderness of heart to a pity he mistook momentarily for love? The image of Levi came back suddenly; she quivered, reading herself through his eyes. And yet would not his crude view be right? ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... to the pestilence from an unlooked for cause. It has been mentioned that the shutting up of houses and seclusion of the sick were regarded as an intolerable grievance, and though most were compelled to submit to it, some few resisted, and tumults and disturbances ensued. As the plague increased, these disturbances became more frequent, and ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... before. "You will not give me up, Harold, but you cannot hold me. I can bear my life in seclusion and retirement, and can even be happy in the thought of our past love, of your greatness, and in the peace of England, which, I should have the consolation of knowing, was due to the sacrifice that we had both ...
— Wulf the Saxon - A Story of the Norman Conquest • G. A. Henty
... certain interest in each other, an interest of curiosity, for I remember that he led the way almost at once into the inner drawing room in order to be free to talk in some seclusion. After half an hour or so I asked him to lunch next day at The Cafe Royal, then the best ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... P. Mortem, vol. i. p. 328., we find that Ralph Cobham died 19th Edward III.[2], that is, the same year in which the Countess entered the Abbey, from whence we may conclude that she retired there to pass in seclusion the period of mourning. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 65, January 25, 1851 • Various
... its development, which even then filled his brain, and have since turned wildernesses into fruitful lands, and squalid towns into great cities. Grave and formal, he could yet unbend; the most sagacious of counsellors, he was a soldier also, and loved the seclusion in which we lived the more that it was not devoid of danger; the neighbouring towns being devoted to the League, and the general disorder alone making it possible for him to lie unsuspected ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... shall I, till a more favourable turn will let me listen to his earnest exhortations that I should do both. Mr. Hay gives me strong hopes that that will soon arrive, and then I shall not vex him by persevering in this seclusion: you know and can judge how little this part of my course costs me, for to quit the side of those we prize when they are in pain, would be a thousand times greater sacrifice than any ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... whose affairs were more or less controlled by an Imperial Council in which Frederick of Saxony was the guiding spirit; popular sentiment was on Luther's side, and the Worms edict was practically a dead letter. But the seclusion of the great Reformer threw the movement largely into the hands of extremists such as Carlstadt and Muenzer to whose anarchical theories he was opposed as ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... defiance at each other, they separated; she marching off with all the dignity of an offended queen to the "sweet seclusion that a cabin grants," whilst he withdrew moodily to a bench, comforted, however, not a little by the thought that he had given Mrs. Carr a ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... at this epoch the sovereigns of Japan had not yet begun to affect the sacred seclusion which, in later ages, became characteristic of them. It is true that, after ascending the throne, they no longer led their troops in war, though they did so as Imperial princes. But in other respects they lived the lives of ordinary ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... position occupied by this woman and the light which shone forth from the sun with which she was clothed stand out in marked contrast with the later description given of her flight into and seclusion in the wilderness. The latter stage of her experience I shall describe further on, but a brief allusion to it will make her first appearance more impressive. The wilderness describes the apostasy which was to envelop the woman and thus obscure her light. Therefore her first appearance as in ...
— The Last Reformation • F. G. [Frederick George] Smith
... have been invented, but the air is not peopled with them as I write. Most of them have folded their pinions and sought the seclusion of a hen-house. It is to be hoped that very soon some such machine will be perfected, whereby a man may flit from the fifth story window of the Grand Pacific Hotel, in Chicago, to Montreal before breakfast, leaving nothing in his room but the ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... after resigning from the army, and in writing his fine peasant story, "Polikushka," setting up peasant-schools on his estate, and the like, he was merely paying his tribute to the spirit of the time (which reached him even in his seclusion), and imitating the innumerable village schools and Sunday schools in the capitals (for secular instruction of the laboring classes who were too busy for education during the week) in which the aristocratic and educated classes in general took a lively interest.[44] But ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... this wedding and on the morning following a grand ball which was given at her home where she shone in all her pride and splendor. In 1822 this "deserted woman" had lived for three years in the most rigid seclusion at Courcelles near Bayeux. Gaston de Nueil, a young man of three and twenty, who had been sent to Normandy for his health, succeeded in making her acquaintance, was immediately smitten with her and, after a long seige, became her lover. This was at Geneva, ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... mustache. Yes! this was his face,—the face that many women in Paris had agreed was romantic and picturesque. Had those wretched greenhorns never seen a real man before? Were they idiots, or insane? A sudden recollection of the silence and seclusion of the building suggested certainly an asylum,—but where were ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... Edinboro'. He was then young, sensitive, and jealous. He believed all that was told him; he asked no explanation of his young wife; he silently abandoned her. And she—faithful to the one love of her life—has lived through all her budding youth and blooming womanhood in loneliness and seclusion, passing her days in acts of charity and devotion. Circumstances have lately placed in my power the means of vindicating this lady's honor, even to the satisfaction of her ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... like it, except in some small pieces in the collections of amateurs."—"I am glad," he answered, "that you like such works. The door is much more beautiful inside. Come in, if you like." My heart, in some degree, failed me. The mysterious dress of the porter, the seclusion, and a something, I know not what, that seemed to be in the air, oppressed me. I paused, therefore, under the pretext of examining the outside still longer; and at the same time I cast stolen glances into the garden, for a garden it was which had opened before me. Just inside ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... his kinsmen, the golden-wing prefers the fields and the borders of the forest to the deeper seclusion of the woods, and hence, contrary to the habit of his tribe, obtains most of his subsistence from the ground, probing it for ants and crickets. He is not quite satisfied with being a woodpecker. He courts the society of the robin and the finches, abandons the trees for the meadow, ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... fame—or, at least, had been so till time had buried him from the knowledge of the present generation and made him obscure instead of infamous. As for the widow Wycherly, tradition tells us that she was a great beauty in her day, but for a long while past she had lived in deep seclusion on account of certain scandalous stories which had prejudiced the gentry of the town against her. It is a circumstance worth mentioning that each of these three old gentlemen—Mr. Medbourne, Colonel Killigrew and Mr. Gascoigne—were early lovers of ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of any light at all, down in that gloomy hole, where we burrowed like rabbits in a warren; and it was the happiest time I had, when all my messmates were asleep, and I could lie on my back, during a forenoon watch below, and read in comparative quiet and seclusion. ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... were no strangers on the Summer Shelter. Some of them had crossed the Atlantic, but not one had ever taken a coastwise voyage on a comparatively small vessel, and although the consequence of this new experience, their involuntary seclusion of the first days of the trip, and their consequent unconventional and irregular acceptance of Mrs. Cliff's hospitality, had caused a little stiffness in their demeanor at first, this speedily disappeared, hand in hand with the recollection of that most easily forgotten of human ...
— Mrs. Cliff's Yacht • Frank R. Stockton
... internal arrangement of this institution is not all it might be as regards the healthy development of youth, the situation of the college resembles the venerable structures of Oxford in that it is too good, far too good, for mere youngsters. This building, in its seclusion from the world, its pastoral surroundings and soul-inspiring panorama, is an abode not for boys but for philosophers; a place to fill with a wave of deep content the sage who has outgrown earthly ambitions. Your eye embraces the snow-clad heights of ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... of the higher in opposition to the lower. When he does this the spiritual life in him makes the first substantial movement in its onward progress—this movement Eucken calls the negative movement. It does not mean that the man must leave the world of work and retire into the seclusion of a monastery—that means shirking the fight, and is a policy of cowardice. Neither does it mean a wild impatience with the present condition of the world—it means rather that man is appreciating in a profound way the oppositions that exist, and is casting his lot on the ...
— Rudolph Eucken • Abel J. Jones
... selection of a lover or doubt your power, Angelique. But are you sure there exists no insurmountable obstacle to oppose these high aspirations? It is whispered that the Intendant has a wife, whom he keeps in the seclusion of Beaumanoir. Is ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... situation of the nation vis-a-vis with nations of Europe, and has ratified one treaty after another with us, the nation itself does not, so far as the traveler can see, appreciate the fact that she cannot possibly resist the white man, and hold herself in seclusion as formerly from the Western world. China is discovering—has discovered officially, although that does not necessarily mean nationally—as Japan did so admirably when her progress was most marked, ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... suffering from one of his frequent headaches, as a result of the overwork he had not been able wholly to avoid. Therefore a long day's work of research in various ancient volumes had been turned over to his assistant by an employer who left him to return to a seclusion ...
— The Twenty-Fourth of June • Grace S. Richmond
... whither, for several days, Felix had been the unembarrassed bearer of apologies and regrets for absence, chance had not taken the cards from the hands of design. Mr. Wentworth and his daughters had respected Eugenia's seclusion; certain intervals of mysterious retirement appeared to them, vaguely, a natural part of the graceful, rhythmic movement of so remarkable a life. Gertrude especially held these periods in honor; she wondered what Madame M; auunster did at such times, but she would not have permitted ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... but one, which boasts a little front den called a coffee-room, with a fireplace, over which is an inscription, politely requesting that, 'to prevent mistakes,' customers will 'please to pay on delivery.' The shabby-genteel man is an object of some mystery, but as he leads a life of seclusion, and never was known to buy anything beyond an occasional pen, except half-pints of coffee, penny loaves, and ha'porths of ink, his fellow-lodgers very naturally suppose him to be an author; and rumours are current ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... unwillingness towards the honor of it. Indeed, dearest Mrs. Martin, it is almost surprising how we contrive to be as dull in London as in Devonshire—perhaps more so, for the sight of a multitude induces a sense of seclusion which one has not without it; and, besides, there were at Sidmouth many more known faces and listened-to voices than we see and hear in this place. No house yet! And you will scarcely have patience to read that papa ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... abundance. The houses are painted in rather gaudy colors, but are neat and pretty. Queer little canvas-covered, two-wheeled carts, their tops shaped like half an egg-shell, are drawn about the town by bullocks at a lively trot. Some are closely curtained, containing women of the harem. Oriental seclusion is the rule with the women. Under the prince who rules here the population exhibits a marked contrast to those of India generally, over which the authority of England extends. There are no mud cabins here, no beggars, no visible want or poverty. ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... Princess to the Royal Court. Hearing which, Smith said: "With your permission, Lady, I will be your escort to King James's Palace, Since it long has been my wish and my intention To resign the student's life, give up seclusion, Once again become a sailor on the seas, Distant lands explore, new maps and history make Whereon future worlds may build. This my hope, This the one ambition that fires the ...
— Pocahontas. - A Poem • Virginia Carter Castleman
... about what is not great, no race of men have such obvious littlenesses. They live in a narrow world so far as their human intercourse goes; their researches involve infinite attention and an almost monastic seclusion; and what is left over is not very much. To witness some queer, shy, misshapen, greyheaded, self-important, little discoverer of great discoveries, ridiculously adorned with the wide ribbon of some order of chivalry and holding a reception of his fellow-men, or to ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... one passed into the burnt district, where the scarred ruins and the uplifting piles of new brick and stone spread abroad under the flooding light of a full moon like another Pompeii, without any increase in his feeling of tranquil seclusion. Even the news-offices had put up their shutters, and a confiding stranger could nowhere buy a guide-book to help his wandering feet about the reposeful city, or to show him how to get out of it. There was, to be sure, a cheerful tinkle of horse-car bells in the air, and in the creeping vehicles ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... her marriage, the daughter of the family was kept in almost Oriental seclusion. Marriage gave her a certain freedom. She might now be present at the races of the circus and the various shows of the theatre and the arena, a privilege rarely accorded to her before marriage. In the early virtuous period ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... heart throbs with uneasiness, it is for my people, it is not for myself. I mourn for my subjects, should Heaven, in its wrath, permit Frederick to prevail. For this it is that my life is spent in seclusion and prayer. Come, my daughters, come, ladies all, let us betake ourselves to ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... enterprise.—The Alleghany ridge of mountains, over which the eastern emigrant had to pass, presented too, no inconsiderable barrier to its earlier location; while the cold, bleak, inhospitable region, extending from the North Branch to the Cheat and Valley rivers, seemed to threaten an entire seclusion from the eastern settlements, and to render it an isolated spot, not easily connected with any other section ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... sir, I recall most frequently and most willingly in my dreams? Not the pleasures of my youth: they were too rare, too much mingled with bitterness, and are now too distant. I recall the period of my seclusion, of my solitary walks, of the fleeting but delicious days that I have passed entirely by myself, with my good and simple housekeeper, with my beloved dog, my old cat, with the birds of the field, the hinds of the forest, with all ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... of them were fair or beautiful, but some pleasing in their manners, and of elegant shape; they are brunettes, one and all, with occasionally large rolling, if not fiery, black eyes. They are gentle in their manners, and were very friendly to The Christian. Many of them, in spite of their seclusion, shewed extreme intelligence; they are also very industrious. My taleb assured me the little money he got from keeping the register of the distribution of water, and other minor matters, could not keep his family, and his chief support was from the industry ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... so too," said Mr. Price. "At present, however, Heaven permits them by the thousand to make painful personal acquaintance with the subject. And I assure you, sir, that the indignation which has long been simmering in whispers over tea tables in the seclusion of scented boudoirs, amongst those same delicate dames whom you have it in your mind to keep in ignorance of the source of most of their sufferings, mental and physical, is fast approaching the boiling point ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... nobles of this country tossed hither and thither like a shuttle-cock at the will of the strongest, that they would not arm for resistance—nay—wrapped themselves in sullen silence in the seclusion of their estates, or gathered in great companies to plunge into the forests and forget their vexations in the comradery and excitement of the chase, while for Caterina the slow days passed in agonized entreaty that some miracle ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... was worn with grace, and hung perfectly; her crape collar was immaculately fresh; her mourning veil fell in charming folds over her hat brim. "It's a pity some one can't tell her," she mused, as she smiled and hurried on to the doubtful seclusion of her own end ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... exchange of salutations and introductions was commonplace enough, and consisted, indeed, of the inevitable repetition of excuses for the eccentric seclusion of the host. He had gone fishing again, of course, and must not be disturbed till the appointed hour, though he sat within a stone's throw of ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... health, and was venturing at last to look forward in earnest to a clerical life; a thought that began to colour and deepen all his more intimate conversations with his friend, who could share with him many of the reflections matured in the seclusion of ill-health. For they were truly congenial spirits, and poor Fordham was more experienced in the lore of suffering and resignation than his twenty-seven ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... bailiffs and reproachful creditors, running from a hundred poor dependants, 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 Johnson, ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Hanover will not on the whole redound much to his honour or advantage. His manners no doubt are, when he pleases, very graceful and captivating. No man knows better how to add to an obligation by the way of conferring it. But on the whole he wants dignity, not only in the seclusion and familiarity of his more private life, but on public occasions. The secret of popularity in very high stations seems to consist in a somewhat reserved and lofty, but courteous and uniform behaviour. Drinking toasts, shaking people by the hand, ...
— Memoirs of the Court of George IV. 1820-1830 (Vol 1) - From the Original Family Documents • Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... favor of liberty have produced female champions that share the same traits, but Emily alone has found a biographer. Only a near friend could have performed for her this task, for the flower was reared in feminine seclusion, and the few and simple traits of her history before her appearance in the field could only have been known to the domestic circle. Her biographer has gathered them up ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... wear a dress suit at dinner or not. You may mix with the jolly crowd, or sit alone in a quiet nook. You may lunch at almost any hour of the day or night. You may dine with other guests, or enjoy the seclusion of a private dining-room. Good fellowship perhaps best expresses ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... autumn came. Out of doors, it brought to the fields the prodigality of the golden harvest,— to the forest, revelations of light,—and to the sky, the sharp air, the morning mist, the red clouds at evening. Within doors, the sense of seclusion, the stillness of closed and curtained windows, musings by the fireside, books, friends, conversation, and the long, meditative evenings. To the farmer, it brought surcease of toil,—to the scholar, that sweet delirium of the brain which changes toil to pleasure. It ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year - Edited by Katherine D. Blake and Georgia Alexander • Various
... a taste, as I have remarked before, for wild beasts and tea-parties, with whom I have as much in common as I have with the feathered lady on a coster's donkey-cart or the Fat Woman at the Fair. I can see all this perfectly well in the calm seclusion of my library. But when I am in her presence my superiority, like Bob Acres's valour, oozes out through my finger-tips; I become a besotted idiot; the sense and the sight and the sound of her overpower ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... grace, knowing perfectly well that it was not for long. The Divorcee then withdrew from the flaming placards of the daily papers, on which she had figured during the past week, and betook herself to the seclusion of her bijou residence in the heart of the most fashionable quarter. Here she pondered for a short time upon the doubtful unkindness of fate which had deprived her of a husband whom she despised, and of a home which his presence had made insupportable. But ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., October 11, 1890 • Various
... had lost the sun, his only guide, in the thickly interlaced boughs above him, which suffused though the long columnar vault only a vague, melancholy twilight. He had evidently penetrated some unknown seclusion, absolutely primeval and untrodden. The thick layers of decaying bark and the desiccated dust of ages deadened his footfall and invested the ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... Abbot Richard's successor, was seized by the king's commissioners, and summarily hung, drawn, and quartered on the top of the neighbouring Tor Hill. Sharpham thereupon "devolved" upon the crown; but the old house remained, standing in peaceful seclusion where the pleasant slope of Polden Hill overlooks the Somersetshire moors, till the birth of the 'father of the English Novel' brought a lasting distinction to the domestic buildings of Abbot Beere. In the accompanying print, published ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... of these optical phenomena, still the illusion was almost perfect enough to warrant the belief that her husband possessed sway over the spiritual world. Then again, when she felt a wish to look forth from her seclusion, immediately, as if her thoughts were answered, the procession of external existence flitted across a screen. The scenery and the figures of actual life were perfectly represented, but with that bewitching, yet indescribable difference, which always makes a picture, ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... church which Mr. Hope built in 1897, a miracle, in these hurried florid days, of honest work and simple modest beauty. The church being Roman Catholic one may with confidence turn aside to rest a little in its cool seclusion, relieved of the irritating search for the sexton of the national establishment, and freed from his haunting presence and suggestion that the labourer is worthy of more than ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... time I am now to speak of, I was living in perfect seclusion, and uninterrupted solitude. Captain —— was always in Dublin, and my chief occupation was in hunting out, and transcribing and arranging matter for the professional gentlemen conducting the lawsuit, from a mass of confused ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... known, or thought that he had known, at Ardkill. Of her as she had there appeared to him he had not been ashamed to think as one who might at some future time be personally related to himself. He had recognized her as a lady whose outward trappings, poor though they might be, were suited to the seclusion in which she lived. But now, although it was only to Ennis that she had come from her nest among the rocks, she seemed to be unfitted for even so much intercourse with the world as that. And in the demand which ...
— An Eye for an Eye • Anthony Trollope
... the Melanesian and Polynesian classes. They are split up into numerous dialects, so widely different that natives of different districts can hardly, if at all, understand each other. It is evident that owing to the seclusion of the villages caused by the general insecurity of former days, and the lack of any literature, the language developed differently in ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... composition. "If I were a young man going a-courting I'd scent my letters with 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 wicked ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... stations," as the engineer jocosely called them, were neat little structures of logs, and there was a log roundhouse, where the Stump Dodger retired in smutty and smoky seclusion when ...
— The Rainy Day Railroad War • Holman Day
... in his company, accompanied by brilliant misunderstanding of his advances and full-front speeches, had never given him enough encouragement to warrant his playing young Lochinvar in Park Lane; and his cup became full when, at the close of the season, she was whisked off to the seclusion of a country-seat, whose walls to him were impregnable. His defeat was then, and afterwards, complete. He pluckily replied to the derision of his relatives with multiplied derision, demanded his inheritance, got his traps together, bought ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Felton's sister, is not only one of the most accomplished but the most natural and jovial of men." Again he says: "I cannot tell you how pleased I was by Agassiz, a most charming fellow, or how I have regretted his seclusion for a while by reason of his mother's death." A valued correspondent, Mr. Grant Wilson, sends me a list of famous Americans who greeted Dickens at his first visit, and in the interval had passed away. "It is melancholy to contemplate the large number of American authors ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... martial and the miraculous always predominated, we rehearsed to each other during our walks, which were usually directed to the most solitary spots about Arthur's Seat and Salisbury Crags. We naturally sought seclusion, for we were conscious no small degree of ridicule would have attended our amusement, if the nature of it had become known. Whole holidays were spent in this singular pastime, which continued for ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... It empowered the King to banish his kinsman to a lonely country house, styled castle by courtesy, and he is confined there even today, with the proviso, though, that he may use the surrounding hunting-grounds. Otherwise he lives in complete seclusion, separated not only from all his friends, but from the very classes of society to which he belongs by birth and education. And he is still a ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... much-gesticulated exposition to a close. "Let me impress upon you once for all that I am not a tripper. As for your castle—you invite me to a banquet-hall deserted. As for your park, I see quite as much of it as I wish to see, from the seclusion of my own pleached garden. I learned long ago the folly of investigating things too closely, the wisdom of leaving things in the vague. At present the park of Ventirose provides me with the raw material for day-dreams. It is a sort of looking-glass ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... reappeared in public places; wives shyly began to respond to the cautious "good-mornings" of their long ignored husbands, the wealthy and socially desirable but otherwise unattractive plucked up spirits; florists, caterers, modistes, ministers came out of seclusion and began to prowl around the debris of their ruined professions with a view to starting out again in business; and here and there the forgotten art of flirting was furtively resurrected and ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... Harriet and Sarah for some years past in our village, and it seemed rather odd taste in these city people. We considered Hattie and Sadie much prettier. Generally the Harriets and Sarahs endured only in the seclusion of the family Bible and the baptismal records. Quite a number of the ladies had met Mrs. Jameson, having either called at Mrs. Liscom's and seen her there, or having spoken to her at church; and as ...
— The Jamesons • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... higher in the criminal hierarchy is the forger. Of his handicraft, specimens are not lacking. There are relics seized when a notorious forger went into forced seclusion for ten years some time ago. He manufactured Bank of France thousand-franc notes and foreign bonds, and even used lithographic stones to imitate the water-mark. Photography played an ...
— Scotland Yard - The methods and organisation of the Metropolitan Police • George Dilnot
... shocked the Russians by leaving the seclusion of the women's apartments, Peter's acts were likely to astonish them still more and to give offense. Rowing in a boat, instead of sitting in it surrounded by his grandees; working like a carpenter, ...
— The Story of Russia • R. Van Bergen
... annoy the mother bird by remaining too long near it. While it is well that the pupils should see the nest with the young birds, they should be taught to respect the desire of the bird for quietness and seclusion. ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... back to her seclusion much happier and yet much lonelier. She had found a friend who had not heard of her disgrace. She had lost a friend who still rejoiced ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... fancy, it easier to write than to sew for bread, or because they covet the applause and adulation heaped upon successful genius, or desire mere notoriety, generally barter their birthright of quiet, life-long happiness in the peaceful seclusion of home for a nauseous mess of poisoned pottage that will not appease their hunger; and they go down to untimely graves disappointed, embittered, hating the public for whose praises they toiled, cheated out of the price for which ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... to the park and rummages through Violet's wardrobe in a state of hapless bewilderment, calling finally upon Gertrude to make a proper selection. Denise attires her young mistress, who looks really pale after this enforced seclusion. Mr. Grandon carries her down-stairs; and if it is not a conventional parlor, the room still has some picturesque aspects of its own, and the two luxurious wolf-robes on the floor are grudged afterward, ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... rumour clearly said War, and the other side of the mountains. It may be that no man has a crazy ambition without at moments suspecting it; but prove it by the touchstone of fact and he becomes at once as a woman whose invalid son, after years of seclusion indoors, wins unexpectedly some athletic prize. When Rodriguez heard all this talk of wars quite near he thought of his castle as already won; his thoughts went further even, floating through Lowlight in the glowing evening, and drifting ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... so affected Haredale that as time passed he grew gloomy and morose and lived in seclusion, thinking only how he could solve the mystery of the murder, and loving more and more the little Emma as she grew into a beautiful girl. He neglected The Warren so that the property looked quite desolate and ruined, and at length superstitious people in the neighborhood came to mutter that it ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... favorably. Whatever restrictions upon trade with Japan are found injurious to that people can not but affect injuriously nations holding commercial intercourse with them. Japan, after a long period of seclusion, has within the past few years made rapid strides in the path of enlightenment and progress, and, not unreasonably, is looking forward to the time when her relations with the nations of Europe and America shall be ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... the primitive little village, discovered by few, which is welcomed by the city man who wants rest and entire seclusion from business matters and the world for a month or two. And oh, what language he uses! and how annoyed he is to find absolutely nothing to do—one post a day, and, worst of all, no newspaper until late in the afternoon! And this is the man who wishes to be ...
— Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Girl - Sister of that "Idle Fellow." • Jenny Wren
... twice, the doors being open, Thatcher had a glimpse across the passage of 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 word or two of respectful ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... Europe and the 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 condition of a city, to a narrow territory, ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... succeeding day after these important discoveries, Middlemas, to his great delight, was rescued from his seclusion in the Hospital, and transferred to his comrade's lodgings in the town of Ryde, of which Hartley himself was a rare inmate; the anxiety of Mrs. Witherington detaining him at the General's house, long after his medical attendance might have ...
— The Surgeon's Daughter • Sir Walter Scott
... "has driven the Turkish officer to seek refuge in seclusion! I used the word 'Wassmuss,' and that had effect; but Tugendheim's insolence was our real passport. Nobody here doubts that we are in full favor at Stamboul. Wassmuss ...
— Hira Singh - When India came to fight in Flanders • Talbot Mundy
... is sleeping peacefully. His features—refined by the mental anxiety, and the almost monastic seclusion to which he has been lately subjected—are extremely pleasing, and even handsome, set-off as they are by the clean collar which he has put on in anticipation of his approaching doom. Before sinking into childlike slumber, he listened with evident pleasure to ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., November 29, 1890 • Various
... ventured to inquire his name and family, when he replied, "I am of the noble tribe of Azzra," and I discovered that he was the son of my father's brother. "Son of my uncle," exclaimed I, "what can have induced thee to court the seclusion of this desert spot, and to quit thy kinsmen, neighbours, ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... were over, and the sixth and fifth form boys had withdrawn to the aristocratic seclusion of their own room, and the rest, or democracy, had sat down to their supper in the hall, Tom and Arthur, having secured their allowances of bread and cheese, started on their feet to catch the eye of the prepostor of the week, who remained in charge during ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... covering. We had neither cold nor intrusive visits to fear. Travellers who penetrate into the wilds of central Africa, and into the pathless forests of the New World, are obliged to watch over each other by night. But we enjoyed absolute safety and utter seclusion; no savages or wild beasts infested these ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... your wits. To-night, therefore, I will endeavour to devise such a task that your successful accomplishment of it will prove to all the world that you are in truth wise enough to sit upon the throne of the Great Onalba." So saying he dismissed the assembled people, and beckoning Doola, sought the seclusion of ...
— Bright-Wits, Prince of Mogadore • Burren Laughlin and L. L. Flood
... moment on 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 seemed ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... great statesman in the seclusion of his prison, in the presence of those clergymen whom he respected, at a supreme moment, when, if ever, a man might be expected to tell the truth. And his whole life which belonged to history, and had been passed on the world's stage before the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... from one window to the other with exclamations of delight. One fellow-passenger laughs at their childish wonder; but to me it is deeply touching, for I see in it the sign of a long and monotonous seclusion: they are the prisoners of work, who have recovered liberty and fresh ...
— An "Attic" Philosopher, Complete • Emile Souvestre
... a blissful period of my existence was it that I passed beneath his roof. Another being seemed created within me, or rather, all that was amiable and excellent was drawn out. I was as recluse as ever I had been at the convent, but how different was my seclusion. My time was spent in storing my mind with lofty and poetical ideas; in meditating on all that was striking and noble in history or fiction; in studying and tracing all that was sublime and beautiful in nature. I was always a visionary, imaginative being, ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... some irregularities of wine, of play, and of idle excursions: but I soon felt the impossibility of associating with them on equal terms; and after the departure of my first acquaintance, I held a cold and civil correspondence with their successors. This seclusion from English society was attended with the most solid benefits. In the Pays de Vaud, the French language is used with less imperfection than in most of the distant provinces of France: in Pavilliard's family, necessity compelled me to listen and to speak; and if I was at first disheartened by ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... untroubled seclusion of Simiti, in its mediaeval atmosphere of romance, and amid its ceaseless dreams of a stirring past, the child unfolded a nature that bore the stamp of divinity, a nature that communed incessantly with her God, ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... thus, in her self-denying works of faith and labours of love, she finds the throbbings of her wounded spirit to beat less fiercely. She has gained all she hopes for in this life, peace—not in gloomy seclusion, but in holy activity—and she knows that there is joy for her laid up in that bright, eternal land where the sorrows of the past can cast no shadows ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... picking spruce gum with Faith and Una in the manse woods and the four of them were now sitting on a fallen pine by the brook, all, it must be admitted, chewing rather vigorously. The Ingleside twins were not allowed to chew spruce gum anywhere but in the seclusion of Rainbow Valley, but Faith and Una were unrestricted by such rules of etiquette and cheerfully chewed it everywhere, at home and abroad, to the very proper horror of the Glen. Faith had been chewing it ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... are speaking of comparative seclusion," said Mrs Grove. "Still, as ladies are supposed to have a fancy for going to extremes, Miss Elliott's taste for quietness is the most desirable ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... was sometimes ferocious, sometimes absorbed in speechless melancholy. Suddenly Evadne quitted London for Paris; he followed, and overtook her when the vessel was about to sail; none knew what passed between them, but Perdita had never seen him since; he lived in seclusion, no one knew where, attended by such persons as his ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... The Daphnean instinct, exceptionally strong in her as a girl, had been revived by her widowed seclusion; and it was not lessened by her affronted sentiments towards the comer, and her regard for another man. She opened some little ivory tablets that lay on the dressing-table, scribbled in pencil on one of them, "I am gone to visit one of my school-friends," gathered a few toilet necessaries ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... their shade like so many hermitages; and finally, the spacious clearing itself, enclosed at either end by the waving palmettos, and bounded on the third side by a wall of gigantic and venerable trees, gave to the whole scene an air of enchanting repose and seclusion. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... you how heavily this blow falls upon me. Dear Uncle Ebeneezer was a distinguished patron of the arts. Our country needs more men like him, men with fine appreciation, vowed to the service of the Ideal. If you will pardon me, I will now retire to my apartment and remain there a short time in seclusion." ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... be "round." But the entr'acte wore on, and no one turned the handle of their door, or disturbed the peaceful somnolence of Harry Lipscomb, who, not being (as he put it) "onto" grand opera, had abandoned the struggle and withdrawn to the seclusion of the inner box. Undine jealously watched Mr. Popple's progress from box to box, from brilliant woman to brilliant woman; but just as it seemed about to carry him to their door he reappeared at his original post ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... replied to the outburst that she had considered it right to propose the scheme for Vittoria's seclusion on account of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... prospect of a constitutional revolution, especially one which menaced their political identity. Robert Haliburton has related the results of his observations before the issue had been fairly disclosed and before Howe had emerged from seclusion to take ...
— The Fathers of Confederation - A Chronicle of the Birth of the Dominion • A. H. U. Colquhoun
... churches. Christian churches they cannot be, for such a city would have an Archbishop and be well known to the civilized world. It must be a Pagan strong-hold that escaped the conquest by its remote position, and the general retreat, retirement, and centralizing seclusion of its surrounding population. It may now be opened to the light ...
— Memoir of an Eventful Expedition in Central America • Pedro Velasquez
... by, summer ripened into fall, and fall faded into winter. All was monotony: the bleak winter season, the shorter days, the longer evenings, the city settling down into a period of seclusion and social inaction. There would be little of gayety this year. No foreign visitors would be entertained by the townsfolk. There would be no Mischienza to look forward to. It would be a lonely winter for ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... are not the misty mid regions of Weir, I don't know where they are. There are two heaps of broken sandstone rocks, with cypress pines growing about them, which will always be a landmark for any future traveller who may seek the wild seclusion of these sequestered caves. The bearing of the water from them is south 51 degrees west, and it is about a mile on that bearing from the northern heap; that with a glance at my map would enable any ordinary ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... who formed an inner circle, shielding her retirement against impertinent curiosity. She rarely or never allowed herself to be seen; Lord Mountjoy, with an official retinue, was in attendance in the house; but the occupation was not a pleasant one, and he was as willing to respect the queen's seclusion as she to remain secluded. Injunctions arrived however from the court at the end of June, which compelled him to request an interview; a deputation of the privy council had come down to inform the ex-queen of the orders of the government, and to desire that they might ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... about the town about Maurice Oakley's attack. In the seclusion of his chamber he was saying to ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... terror with which he had appealed to her—the outcast woman—for support against his instinctively discovered enemy. She decided, moreover, that he had a right to her utmost aid. Little accustomed, in her long seclusion from society, to measure her ideas of right and wrong by any standard external to herself, Hester saw—or seemed to see—that there lay a responsibility upon her in reference to the clergyman, which she owned to no other, nor to the ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... be expected to feel. This enthusiasm was all the greater, when it became known that these remarkable works, which had been originally published anonymously, were from the pen of a woman still young, who had passed her life in domestic seclusion."[28] Encouraged by the success of the first volume of her dramas on the "Passions," the author added a second in 1802, and a third in 1812. During the interval, she published a volume of miscellaneous dramas in 1804, and ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... body to a cave in the mountain. Then they slew his horses, and we gave away all of his other property,[10] as was customary in our tribe, after which his body was deposited in the cave, his arms beside him. His grave is hidden by piles of stone. Wrapped in splendor he lies in seclusion, and the winds in the pines sing a low requiem over the ...
— Geronimo's Story of His Life • Geronimo
... so large a garden as to be well out of cry; on all other sides, open fields stretched upward to the woods of Corstorphine Hill, or backward to the dells of Ravelston, or downward toward the valley of the Leith. The effect of seclusion was aided by the great height of the garden walls, which were, indeed, conventual, and, as John had tested in former days, defied the climbing schoolboy. The lamp of the cab threw a gleam upon the door and the not brilliant ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... ten months of seclusion I led the life of poverty and solitude that I have described to you; I used to steal out unobserved every morning to buy my own provisions for the day; I tidied my room; I was at once master and servant, and played the Diogenes ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... the apparent triumph of the principles of disorder in the revolutions of Naples and Piedmont, combined with increasingly disquieting symptoms of discontent in France, Germany and among his own people, that completed Alexander's conversion. In the seclusion of the little town of Troppau, where in October of 1820 the powers met in conference, Metternich found an opportunity for cementing his influence over Alexander which had been wanting amid the turmoil and feminine intrigues of Vienna and Aix. Here, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... improved his health thirty per cent. It was mentally that he suffered. His was one of those just-as-good cheap-substitute minds, incapable of harbouring more than one idea at a time, and during those sixty days of quiet seclusion it was filled with an ever-growing resentment against Officer Keating. Every day, as he moved about his appointed tasks, he brooded on his wrongs. Every night was to him but the end of another day that kept ...
— Death At The Excelsior • P. G. Wodehouse
... there just as he was at many other hotels where less-favored members of his race were excluded. He never patronized this hotel or any other for the purpose of asserting his rights, but merely to obtain the comforts and the seclusion so essential to a man who always worked up to the limits of even his great strength and usually a little beyond such limits. It is, indeed, quite possible that he might have lived longer had he been free to stop at hotels in the South instead of undergoing ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... its grounds the interesting Queen Marie Antoinette passed many happy hours of seclusion; and would that her retreat had been confined to the maze of Nature, rather than she had been engaged in the political intrigues which exposed her to the fury of a revolutionary mob. In the palace we were ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 377, June 27, 1829 • Various
... she, sighing, "perhaps I ought not to accept of your kindness. My husband's death should remind me of the transitory nature of life, and should lead me to pass the remainder of my days in seclusion, devoting ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... disappointment to which she had led him; and she hoped that he suspected the state of affairs, though Tom, no longer supplanted by his elder brother, pursued Meta into the sheltered nook, where Flora had favoured her seclusion, to apologise for having left her to the guidance of poor Norman, whose head was with the blackamoors. It was ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... not caring to display herself and shunning the bustle, living at Paris, as at Grenoble, in peaceful seclusion, caring only for the existence of her husband, his work, and his speeches that he prepared with so much courageous labor. She sat up with him until very late, glancing over the books, the summaries of the laws ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... great comfort to me that I have had a room to myself so far on this campaign. I find the communal spirit is not in me. The noisy meals, the heavy bowls of soup, the piles of labelled dinner-napkins, give me an unexpected feeling of oppressive seclusion and solitude, and only when I get away by myself do I feel that my soul ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... grey skies and windswept streets made no cheerful impression upon her. The people, the hurrying footsteps, and the curious Pembrokeshire accent, gave her the impression of having travelled to a foreign country, all was so different to the peaceful seclusion of the Berwen banks. It was a "horrid dull town," she thought and with the consciousness of the angry white harbour which she had caught sight of on her arrival, her heart sank within her; but she bravely determined to put a good face on her sorrow. ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... to dispose of the furniture. The books might go at her leisure. Then the first of the week she could select such furniture as she desired in order to arrange the billiard room for her study. If she had a suitable place in which to work in seclusion, there need be no hurry about the library. She conscientiously prepared all the lessons required in her school course for the next day and then, stacking her books, she again unlocked the drawer opened the previous evening, and taking from ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... affliction, sorrow,—- even if they could be long maintained under such circumstances. Nor even, in the case of exemption from the worst ills of life, can we be happy without some positive agreeables—family, general society, amusements, and gratifications. There is a certain degree of loneliness, seclusion, dulness, that destroys happiness without sapping health, or miming us ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... beard. His exit disappointed them. He had not remained long under fire. They felt that they could have interested themselves with him an entire evening. " Come back, Whiskers! Oh, come back! " Out in the main hall he made a ges. ture of despair to some of his gaping minions and then fled to seclusion. ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... raided, and he jumped his bail and came to this country. Now he is running this private hospital in Sowell Street. Needham says it's a secret rendezvous for dope fiends. But they are very high-class dope fiends, who are willing to pay for seclusion, and the police can't get at him. I may add that he's tall and muscular, with a big black beard, and hands that could strangle a bull. In Chicago, during the poison trial, the newspapers called him ...
— The Lost House • Richard Harding Davis
... more and more necessary to adhere to this system of seclusion; for it was not alone the hisses of the boys and populace that pursued him—a fiend of more malignant aspect was ever at his elbow, in the form of his brother. To whatever place of amusement he betook himself, and however well he concealed ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... to the judgment of twelve men in the jury-box or of one man on the bench; twelve men fresh from the people and warmed with the instinctive sympathies of humanity, or one man, separated from the people by his station and by the habits of a life passed in seclusion and study. A jury-trial must be the same whether a man or woman be arraigned. And the subject under consideration is important even to men who are regardless ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... eerie. They were high up on a mountain on a shelf that gave back into a shallow cave. In front, facing the desert, was a heap of rock that formed a natural rampart. A tiny spring bubbled from the cave floor. Here the little party would seem as secure in their dizzy seclusion as eagles ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... recorded in the Tracts for the Times, twenty-nine of which were written by Newman, and in his Parochial and Plain Sermons (1837- 1843). After nine years of spiritual conflict Newman retired to Littlemore, where, with a few followers, he led a life of almost monastic seclusion, still striving to reconcile his changing belief with the doctrines of his own church. Two years later he resigned his charge at St. Mary's and left the Anglican communion,—not bitterly, but with a deep and tender regret. His last sermon at Littlemore on "The Parting ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... time had buried him from the knowledge of the present generation, and made him obscure instead of infamous. As for the Widow Wycherley, tradition tells us that she was a great beauty in her day; but, for a long while past, she had lived in deep seclusion, on account of certain scandalous stories which had prejudiced the gentry of the town against her. It is a circumstance worth mentioning that each of these three old gentlemen, Mr. Medbourne, Colonel Killigrew, and Mr. Gascoigne, were early lovers of the Widow Wycherley, and had once ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... reaching forward for the handle of his carriage, "go down to the Tower. It is just possible that a few days' seclusion might be ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Europe, nothing that was either Irish or Scotch, very little that was Welsh. As Palfrey says, the population of 26,000 that had been planted in New England by 1640 "thenceforward continued to multiply on its own soil for a century and a half, in remarkable seclusion from other communities." During the whole of this period New England received but few immigrants; and it was not until after the Revolutionary War that its people had fairly started on their westward march into the state of New York and ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... there was a pool Fringed all about with flag-leaves cool And spotted with cow-lilies garish, Of frogs and pouts the ancient parish. Alders the creaking redwings sink on, Tussocks that house blithe Bob o' Lincoln. Hedged round the unassailed seclusion, Where muskrats piled their cells Carthusian; And many a moss-embroidered log, The watering-place of summer frog, Slept and decayed with patient skill, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... intrusion. You may walk before you all day long, and not fear to touch the barrier of your Eden, or stumble out of fairyland into the land of gin and steam-hammers. And there is an old tale enhances for the imagination the grandeur of the woods of France, and secures you in the thought of your seclusion. When Charles VI. hunted in the time of his wild boyhood near Senlis, there was captured an old stag, having a collar of bronze about his neck, and these words engraved on the collar: "Caesar mini hoc donavit." It is no wonder if the minds of men ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... last—that is to say, comparatively alone, for there were too many aristocrats, too many criminels and traitors, in the prisons of Paris now, to allow of any seclusion of those who were about to ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... maintained seclusion was so marked that even his English friends, accustomed as they were to the exclusiveness of their kind, commented on it. Barclay openly lamented, for, as he said, "Was not Sir Paul the best of company when he chose, and why come here to this gay ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... laughter is an escape from terror, a liberation of the soul by mental explosion, from the prison walls of despair and brooding. In the Decameron of Boccaccio a group of men and women encompassed by plague retired into seclusion to tell one another mirthful immoralities which stirred their laughter. They laughed while the plague destroyed society around them and when they knew that its foul germs were on the prowl for their own bodies... So it was in this war, where in many strange places and in many dreadful days there ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... dangerous elevation, Elleray possesses a double character of beauty, rarely found in connection; and yet each, by singular good fortune, in this case absolute and unrivalled in its kind. Within a bow-shot of each other may be found stations of the deepest seclusion, fenced in by verdurous walls of insuperable forest heights, and presenting a limited scene of beauty—deep, solemn, noiseless, severely sequestered—and other stations of a magnificence so gorgeous as few estates in this island can boast, and of ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... her foot, and, with a terrible glance at the men, descended to the cabin. From this coign of vantage she obstinately refused to budge, and sat in angry seclusion until the vessel reached Ipswich late in the evening. Then she appeared on deck, dressed for walking, and, utterly ignoring the woebegone Codd, stepped ashore, and, obtaining a cab for ...
— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs
... first year went by, in magnificent seclusion and activity of learning. It was strenuous as a battle, her college life, ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... of law were at length complete, and Mr. Arnot found himself in a prison cell, with the prospect that years must elapse before he would receive a freedom that now was dreaded almost more than his forced seclusion. After his conviction he had been taken from Hillaton to a large prison of the State, in ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... the rents of which he lived very straitly, and a single falcon, the best in the world. The estate was at Campi, and thither, deeming it no longer possible for him to live in the city as he desired, he repaired, more in love than ever before; and there, in complete seclusion, diverting himself with hawking, he bore his poverty as patiently ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... "like the outpouring of the sewers, a flood of base desires invaded every square and cross-road, ever more putrid and more swollen," D'Annunzio retired to Francovilla-al-Mare, a few miles from his birthplace. There he lives in seclusion, esteemed by the simple-minded, honest, and somewhat fanatical peasantry, to whose quaint and primitive manners his books owe much ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... the first-year men from the sophomores and seniors, giving many anxious and worried moments to the younger students over the outcome of the one important event of the year. It had also been the custom to try to capture the president of the freshman class and hold him in seclusion until after the banquet, thereby making his opening speech impossible. The dread that they should lose their leader became more and more apparent among the banquet holders as the days advanced, and extensive ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... delights and superfluities were added at the annual visit which the Emperor paid his children, when the iron gate was opened to the sound of music, and during eight days every one that resided in the valley was required to propose whatever might contribute to make seclusion pleasant, to fill up the vacancies of attention, and lessen the tediousness of time. Every desire was immediately granted. All the artificers of pleasure were called to gladden the festivity; the musicians ...
— Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia • Samuel Johnson
... sought after, that during the whole time they dared not once light a fire, nor attempt fishing from the rocks to supply themselves with food; and, though they escaped the search, they never, it is said, completely recovered the horrors of their term of dreary seclusion, but bore about with them, in broken constitutions, the effects of the hardships to which they had been subjected. They must have had full time and opportunity, during that miserable winter, for testing the justice of the policy that had sent poor Smith into exile, from his snug southern ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... dazzled by the world, Catherine of Cardona has trampled it beneath her feet, and later on, becoming entirely free from the slavery of the world, she retires to the Capuchin Convent at Naples, and there prepares, by a seclusion of twenty-five years, to give to the great ones of the earth an example of the most sublime virtues. Called by the Princess of Salerno to share her disfavor with the king, she hesitates not to quit her dear solitude, ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... for the perplexity of her friend, that she suggested that they should not consult the Platypus. But the Kangaroo said it must be done, because no one in the bush was so learned. Being such a strange creature, and living in such seclusion, and being so difficult to approach, was a proof that it was the right adviser to seek. So, with a half desperate air, the Kangaroo left the little girl, and went down ...
— Dot and the Kangaroo • Ethel C. Pedley
... Japanese lady; and from such incessant attention it is difficult to escape within the narrow bounds of ship life. The only way to keep off the impossibles was to form a bodyguard of the possibles. The seclusion of the honeymoon paradise had to be opened up for once ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... would hide within its shelter, Settlin' in some cosy nook, Where no calls nor threats could stir me From the pages o' my book. Oh, that quiet, sweet seclusion In its fulness passeth words! It was deeper than the deepest That my sanctum now affords. Why, the jaybirds an' the robins, They was hand in glove with me, As they winked at me an' warbled ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... 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 footing with them was so obvious that ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... months seclusion as a spy, I was admitted to join the prisoners of war, and in twenty months to go into the interior of the island, on parole; I there had liberty to range two leagues all round, and was unrestricted ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis Volume 2 • Matthew Flinders
... had recovered its ordinary aspect, began this miserable life of poverty and intrigue to earn one's bread—seven duros a month! To endure at all hours the complaints of those poor women, with their tempers embittered by seclusion, common as the lowest servants, who spend their lives gossiping in the parlour of what is passing in the towns, inventing scandals to please the canons, or the families who protect the house. And there are priests who envy me! hungering against me for this coveted chaplaincy ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... man sit down quietly under accusations and insults and injuries that you spend all the rest of your life resenting and repaying. And that is the reason also that so many of God's best saints in other ages and other communions used to pursue evangelical humility and ascetic poverty and seclusion till they obliterated themselves out of all human remembrance, and buried themselves in retreats of silence and of prayer. Yes, you are quite right. A garment of sackcloth may cover an unsanctified heart; and the fathers of the desert did ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... have been augured that an existence so placid and benevolent would have been terminated in a ripe old age by a dissolution equally gradual and calm. But how unsearchable are the workings of Providence! The peaceful and retired seclusion amid which the honoured evening of Dr Haynes' life was mellowing to its close was destined to be disturbed, nay, shattered, by a tragedy as appalling as it was unexpected. The morning of ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary - Part 2: More Ghost Stories • Montague Rhodes James
... deserted streets of the Marais. He had been celebrating, in company with his two faithful borrowers, Chebe and Delobelle, his first moment of leisure, the end of that almost endless period of seclusion during which he had been superintending the manufacture of his press, with all the searchings, the joys, and the disappointments of the inventor. It had been long, very long. At the last moment he had discovered a defect. The crane did not work well; and he had had to revise his plans and drawings. ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... Sunday morning, immediately made it a matter of personal interest to themselves. One of these was Mr. Latham, another was Mr. Schultze, and a third was Mr. Birnes. The fourth was Mr. E. van Cortlandt Wynne. In the seclusion of his home in Thirty-seventh Street, Mr. Wynne read the story with puckered brows, then re-read it, after which he paced back and forth across his room in troubled thought for an hour or more. An oppressive sense ...
— The Diamond Master • Jacques Futrelle
... could collect; and a few days afterwards Mr. Hazeldean received a letter from a solicitor of repute in London, stating that a very respectable foreign gentleman had commissioned him to treat for Clump Lodge, otherwise called the "Casino;" that the said gentleman did not shoot, lived in great seclusion, and, having no family, did not care about the repairs of the place, provided only it were made weather-proof,—if the omission of more expensive reparations could render the rent suitable to his finances, ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... share of self-consciousness; he had been readily piqued, had shown an unusual dread of being personally obtrusive. But now his sense of self, as an individual provoking opinion, appeared to leave him. When, therefore, after a day or two of seclusion, he came forth again, and the few acquaintances he had formed in the town condoled with him on what had happened, and pitied his haggard looks, he did not shrink from their regard as he would have done formerly, but took their sympathy as it would ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... past, before any of the artificialities appertaining to our present mode of living were introduced; when the world was but thinly populated and there were vast regions of wild wastes and silent forests, the Known and Unknown walked hand in hand. It was seclusion of this kind, the seclusion of nature, that spirits loved, and it was in this seclusion they were always to be found whenever man wanted to hold communication with them. To such silent spots—to the woods and wildernesses—Buddha, Mohammed, the Hebrew Patriarchs and Prophets, all, in their turn, ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... Mattioli was, of course, known to the world. The cause of his enlevement, and the place of his captivity, Pignerol, were matters of newspaper comment at least as early as 1687. Still earlier, in 1682, the story of Mattioli's arrest and seclusion in Pignerol had been published in a work named "La Prudenza Trionfante di Casale."[1] There was thus no mystery, at the time, about Mattioli; his crime and punishment were perfectly well known to students of politics. He has been regarded as the mysterious Man in the Iron Mask, but, ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... something intuitive in the science which teaches us the knowledge of our race. Some men emerge from their seclusion, and find, all at once, a power to dart into the minds and drag forth the motives of those they see; it is a sort of second sight, born with ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 534 - 18 Feb 1832 • Various
... dreffle ones! my! yes! green eyes! awful cats, that spit fire out o' their mouths, and claws that'll scratch yer to death;" imitating the clawing with their long dirty fingers quite in the face of poor Bunch, who immediately retired to the seclusion of her apron, and ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various |
