"Cloister" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sufficiently possessed of that all-denying zeal of the Catholic enthusiast to which every human tie and earthly duty has been often sacrificed on the shrine of a rapt and metaphysical piety. Whatever her opinions, her new creed, her secret desire of the cloister, fed as it was by the sublime, though fallacious notion, that in her conversion, her sacrifice, the crimes of her race might be expiated in the eyes of Him whose death had been the great atonement of a world; whatever such higher thoughts and sentiments, ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book IV. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Bouvignes. Our men behave like vandals: everything is upset; the sight of the slaughtered inhabitants defies all description; not a house is left standing. We have dragged out of every corner all survivors, one after another, men, women, and children, found in a burning cloister, and have ...
— Their Crimes • Various
... his [the king's] coming in to the bishop's palace [at Amiens], where he intended to dine with my Lord Cardinal, there sat within a cloister about two hundred persons diseased with the king's evil, upon their knees. And the king, or ever he went to dinner, provised every of them with rubbing them and blessing them with his bare hands, being bareheaded all the while; after whom followed his ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 69, February 22, 1851 • Various
... the greatest stage of all time, and on it placed a lot of little figures, "pigmy minds"—all save one, and he the nearest great, an unworldly person summoned from a cloister, with the vision of genius and the practical incapacity of one who has run away from life, hating men but loving all mankind, eloquent but inarticulate in a large way, incapable of true self expression ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... nun, to be a nun!" he repeated. "You do not know, my child, the life, the misery, which is hidden behind the walls of the convent. You do not know it! I prefer a thousand times to see you unhappy in the world than to see you unhappy in the cloister. Here your complaints can be heard, there you will have only the walls. You are beautiful, very beautiful, and you were not born for it, you were not born to be the bride of Christ! Believe me, my child, time will blot it all ...
— Friars and Filipinos - An Abridged Translation of Dr. Jose Rizal's Tagalog Novel, - 'Noli Me Tangere.' • Jose Rizal
... declare this novel, as it is the latest, to be also the finest of all that Charles Reade has given us. In saying this we do not forget the "Cloister and Hearth," which, however tender and touching and true to its century, is rather a rambling narrative than an elucidated plot. "Very Hard Cash" is wrought out with the finest finish, yet nowhere overdone; it so abounds in scenes of dramatic climax that we fancy the ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... nourished into spiritual qualities. Excavating into serenity, we shall discover the pure gold of scholarship; we shall find knowledge in great abundance; we shall find the spirit of the greatest and best books; and we shall come upon the cloister in which meditation ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... has picked up a whole cloister full of old chairs in Herefordshire. He bought them one by one, here and there in farm-houses, for three and sixpence and a crown apiece. They are of wood, the seats triangular, the backs, arms, and legs loaded ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... afterwards are yet extant in the nunnery where she resided; and are often read to the young religious, in order to inspire them with good resolutions and sentiments of virtue. It so happened that after Constantia had lived about ten years in the cloister, a violent fever broke out in the place, which swept away great multitudes, and among others Theodosius. Upon his death-bed he sent his benediction in a very moving manner to Constantia, who at that time was herself so far gone in the same fatal distemper that she ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... nature Rioting in first liberty; and if This blossom do but promise such a flower As promises in turn its kindly fruit: Forthwith upon your brows the royal crown, That now weighs heavy on my aged brows, I will devolve; and while I pass away Into some cloister, with my Maker there To make my peace in penitence and prayer, Happily settle the disorder'd realm That now cries loudly ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... splendour and richness of their appointments. Behind this great Pavilion that faced the great gate, there was a wall with a passage in it shutting off the inner part of the Palace. On entering this you found another great edifice in the form of a cloister surrounded by a portico with columns, from which opened a variety of apartments for the King and the Queen, adorned like the outer walls with such elaborate work as we have mentioned. From the cloister again you passed into ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... breezes borne, A silken stir floats slowly by, And from the clouds a silver dawn Breaks through the vapor-shrouded sky; The cloister'd walk is paved with light, And bathed in crystal beams she stands: No jewels crown her presence bright, A single ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... that my boast is true: The accident which brought me to her eye, Upon the moment did her force subdue, And now she would the caged cloister fly: Religious love put out religion's eye: Not to be tempted, would she be immur'd, And now, to ...
— A Lover's Complaint • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... his daily habits. He had forgotten to worry over the execution of his private programmes. He had forgotten even that the solemn thirtieth birthday was close upon him. It seemed to him as if his own egoism was lying about in scattered pieces, which he must collect in the calm of this cloister, and reconstruct. He wanted to resume possession of himself, very slowly, without violent effort. He wound up his watch; the hour was not yet half-past ten. The whole exquisite ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... the snow lay white, as if a flock of swans had settled there. On the coast below were lovely green woods, and close on shore a building of some kind, the mermaid didn't know whether it was church or cloister. Citrons and orange trees grew in the garden, and before the porch were stately palm trees. The sea ran in here and formed a quiet bay, unruffled, but very deep. The little mermaid swam with the prince to the white sandy shore, laid him on the warm sand, taking care that his head ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... life serves but to contemplate death. Activity of mind, with such an uniformity of existence, would be a most cruel torment. In the midst of the cloister grow four cypresses. This dark and silent tree, which is with difficulty agitated by the wind, introduces no appearance of motion into this abode. Near the cypresses is a fountain, scarcely heard, whose fall is so feeble and slow, that one would be led to call it the clepsydra of this ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... much comfort or profit. Yet one has still time to wonder at the strange effect produced by crowding the buildings of a great monastery on the top of the rock, an effect which reaches its highest point when we go up a staircase and find ourselves landed in a cloister of singular beauty. But the rock and the buildings—nowhere better seen than from the Mount of Dol—are still there, a most striking object from every point of the landscape, Saint Michael "in peril of the sea" seeming ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... things that are above." If by calling yourself a Christian you mean that you aim at the higher, the spiritual, the divine life, then think of things that are above. [Greek: Ta ano phroneite], think heaven itself. And heaven lies around us in our daily life—not in the cloister, in incense-breathing aisle, in devotions that isolate us, and force a sentiment unreal, morbid, and even false, but in the generous and breathing activities of our life. Religion glorifies, because it idealizes, that very life we are each called on to lead. Look, therefore, round in your ...
— Three Addresses to Girls at School • James Maurice Wilson
... to the Sisters in the Cloister at Naumberg, written probably in the autumn of 1523, he says: "A true Christian life in its essential requirements does not consist in external appearance . . . but quite the contrary, it does consist in personal trust in God through an experience of Jesus Christ, which the Holy Ghost ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... constellation or the Birth of the Virgin. The Church of Notre Dame at Paris is supposed to be on the original site of a Temple of Isis; and it is said (but I have not been able to verify this myself) that one of the side entrances—that, namely, on the left in entering from the North (cloister) side—is figured with the signs of the Zodiac EXCEPT that the sign Virgo is replaced by the figure of the ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... much admired by all lovers of musick, his company was therefore desired; and company, especially musical company, delighting in drinking, made him drink more than ordinary, which brought him to his grave." And he was buried in the cloister of ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... the north portal being especially remarkable. The nave, which is without aisles, is surmounted by two cupolas; its interior is whitewashed and plain in appearance, while the choir is decorated with medieval paintings. Adjoining the church to the south-east there are remains of a cloister built from 1494 to 1509. St Urcisse, the chief of the other ecclesiastical buildings, stands near the cathedral. Dating from the 12th and 13th centuries, it preserves Romanesque capitals recarved in the 14th century. The principal ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... the Monkey Temple, like the ceremony of the slaughter, is open to the heavens, and is surrounded by a cloister lined with cell-like niches for solitary meditation and introspection. On the terrace, on every protruding bit of architecture, on every window ledge—wherever foothold may be gained—are monkeys, loathsomely fat, and made more disgusting from ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... stated that the squared and carved beams were brought from the San Francisco Mountains, more than a hundred miles away, under the direction of the priests, and that they were carved and finished prior to transportation. They were intended for the chapel and cloister, but the latter building was never finished. The roof timbers were finally distributed among the people of Shumopavi and Shupaulovi. At Shumopavi one of the kivas, known, as the Nuvwatikyuobi (The-high-place-of-snow—San Francisco Mountains) kiva, was built ...
— Eighth Annual Report • Various
... shut out the world forever, certain sins and ambitions were annihilated, while others were enormously magnified. All outside interests vanished; but sin remained, for it circulates in the human heart as naturally as blood in the body. The cloister was simply a little world, with the nobleness and meanness of human nature exceedingly conspicuous. When the men were once enclosed in the cloister walls, they knew that they must live in that circumscribed ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... sermons extant in the library of the gymnasium of the Grey Cloister in Berlin; and the titles and texts of three more are known. They are all funeral sermons. We would close this notice of the life of Gerhardt with a few extracts from Wackernagel's preface to his edition of ...
— Paul Gerhardt's Spiritual Songs - Translated by John Kelly • Paul Gerhardt
... bade the rest retire; And when they were alone, the Angel said, "Art thou the King?" Then bowing down his head, King Robert crossed both hands upon his breast, And meekly answered him: "Thou knowest best! My sins as scarlet are; let me go hence, And in some cloister's school of penitence, Across those stones, that pave the way to heaven, Walk barefoot, till my guilty soul is shriven!" The Angel smiled, and from his radiant face A holy light illumined all the place, And through the open window, ...
— Tales of a Wayside Inn • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... lived, and from the bloody scene of her husband's execution she repaired to Kiew. There would she live in the cloister of the Penitents, preserving the memory of the being she loved, and imploring the vengeance of Heaven upon ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... hospital, all very commodious and useful. On one side there is a channel with water continually running for the service of the hospital and for grinding corn, with no small benefit and convenience for that place, as all may imagine. Between the two divisions of the hospital there is a cloister, 80 braccia in extent in one direction and 160 in the other, in the middle of which is the church, so contrived as to serve for both divisions. In a word, this place is so well built and designed, that I do not believe that there is its like in Europe. According to the account of Filarete himself, ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 3 (of 10), Filarete and Simone to Mantegna • Giorgio Vasari
... Temple. To the left of the Bright Angel Gorge, quite an assemblage of buttes awaits inspection. The dominating pile almost opposite Brahma—across Bright Angel—is Buddha Temple, and below it is Buddha Cloister. Beyond this is another butte, which, however, at times, can scarcely be detected from the main walls of the Kaibab. Yet it is a separate butte of great proportions, and is named Manu Temple, after the great law-giver of the Hindoos. Buddha's ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... was emphatically the Lover of his time! Often as, in his pilgrimage from land to land, he passed the walls of some quiet and lonely convent, he seriously meditated the solemn vows, and internally resolved that the cloister should receive his maturer age. The absence of years had, however, in some degree restored the dimmed and shattered affection for his fatherland, and he desired once more to visit the city in which he had first beheld Irene. "Perhaps," he thought, ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... in seclusion,' she answered. I made bold and replied that I thought it required much greater strength to go on the battlefield of the world and be good than live within the impenetrable walls of a cloister where bin cannot come. 'But, child, thou wilt see beautiful things made by the hand of man that will fill thy heart leaving not room for the Divine Presence.' 'Nay,' said I, 'I shall see God's work in every beauteous thing and I shall ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... The Duke of Savoy was, as usual, resting after dinner in the long gallery, or perron, built the whole length of the keep, on a level with the first floor, and overlooking the great courtyard below. It was like a cloister, with great arched windows, and served for a general meeting-place or lounge in cold or wet weather. From thence he could see the boy going through all his pretty feats of horsemanship as if he had been a man of thirty who had been trained to war ...
— Bayard: The Good Knight Without Fear And Without Reproach • Christopher Hare
... living, not the dead. I don't propose that you be led At once to Hymen's arms; But give me leave, in proper time, To rearrange the broken chime With one who is as good, at least, In all respects, as the deceased.' 'Alas!' she sigh'd, 'the cloister vows Befit me better than a spouse.' The father left the matter there. About one month thus mourn'd the fair; Another month, her weeds arranged; Each day some robe or lace she changed, Till mourning dresses served to grace, And took of ornament the place. ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... being perhaps due to contamination with Span. canino, canine, voracious. It can hardly be doubted that this word suggested Shakespeare's Caliban. Seraglio is due to confusion between the Turkish word serai, a palace, and Ital. serraglio, "an inclosure, a close, a padocke, a parke, a cloister or secluse" (Florio), which belongs to Lat. sera, ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... are not to be jested with." The knight and the fisherman then refreshed their reverend guest with food and wine, and when he had somewhat recovered himself, he began to relate how he had the day before set out from his cloister, which lay far beyond the great lake, intending to travel to the bishop, in order to acquaint him with the distress into which the monastery and its tributary villages had fallen on account of the ...
— Undine - I • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... [He will steal, sir, an egg out of a cloister] I know not that cloister, though it may etymologically signify any thing shut is used by our author, otherwise than for a monastery, and therefore I cannot guess whence this hyperbole could take its original: perhaps it means ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... and lothsome prison. [Sidenote: S. Bartholomews hospital.] He also builded more than the halfe of S. Bartholomews hospitall in west Smithfield. He builded likewise the beautifull librarie in the graie friers in London now called Christs hospitall, standing in the north part of the cloister thereof, where in the wall his armes be grauen in stone. He also builded for the ease of the maior of London, his brethren, and the worshipfull citizens, on the solemne daies of their assemblie, [Sidenote: Guildhall chapell.] a chapell adioining to the Guildhall; to the intent that before they entered ...
— Chronicles (3 of 6): Historie of England (1 of 9) - Henrie IV • Raphael Holinshed
... roof of the cloisters, which is perfect for three sides of the quadrangle, a magnificent view is obtained through the fine old Gothic open window, which looks down sheer to the great depth below, and commands the entire country seaward. Descending into the courtyard to the northern cloister we pass two large sarcophagi of white marble. One of these has been elaborately worked in rich garlands of flowers and very grand bulls' heads, together with nude figures, all of which have been much damaged. These sarcophagi ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... topics which suit the multitude, which attract the poor, which sway the unlearned, which warn, arrest, recall, the wayward and wandering, are in place within the precincts of a University as elsewhere. A Studium Generale is not a cloister, or noviciate, or seminary, or boarding-school; it is an assemblage of the young, the inexperienced, the lay and the secular; and not even the simplest of religious truths, or the most elementary article of the Christian faith, can be ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... sweet city with her dreaming spires,' lovely as Venice in its splendour, noble in its learning as Rome, down the long High Street that winds from tower to tower, past silent cloister and stately gateway, till it reaches that long, grey seven-arched bridge which Saint Mary used to guard (used to, I say, because they are now pulling it down to build a tramway and a light cast- iron bridge in its place, desecrating the loveliest city in England)—well, we were coming ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... but more useful, recognizing the bodily necessities of men. The religious duties of monks were still dreary, monotonous, and gloomy,—long and protracted singing in the choir, incessant vigils, an unnatural silence at the table, solitary walks in the cloister, the absence of social pleasures, confinement to the precincts of their convents; but their convents became bee-hives of industry, and their lands were highly cultivated. The monks were hospitable; they entertained strangers, and gave a shelter ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... fair. The king but deemed she fainted there. While dropped his tears of pity warm, He took her hands and raised her form. Upon his shoulder drooped her head, And Karl was ware that she was dead. When thus he saw that life was o'er, He summoned noble ladies four. Within a cloister was she borne; They watched beside her until morn; Beneath a shrine her limbs were laid; Such honour Karl ...
— Song and Legend From the Middle Ages • William D. McClintock and Porter Lander McClintock
... than even I feared," said Lady Muriel. "I knew Fulk to be unscrupulous and grasping, but I did not think him capable of such foul oppression. For you, my sweet Agnes—would that I could prevail on him to leave you in the safe arms of the cloister—but, alas! I have no right to detain you from a ...
— The Lances of Lynwood • Charlotte M. Yonge
... publicly mentioned in the archives of the edifice was the Master Enrique. He also directed the work of the Cathedral of Leon. He died July 10, 1277. The second architect was Juan Perez, who died in 1296, and was buried in the cloister, under the cathedral. He is believed to have been either the son or brother of the celebrated Master Pedro Perez, who designed the Cathedral of Toledo, and who died in 1299. The third architect of the Cathedral of Burgos was Pedro Sanchez, who directed the work in 1384; after him followed ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 344, August 5, 1882 • Various
... of our hurrying, pushing age, that they could almost throw their minds back through the centuries, and imagine they heard the vesper bell tolling from the tower overhead, and the slow footfalls of the monks pacing round the cloister to those carved seats in the choir of which the very remains were ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... some great noblemen were sent, they would assume the tone and manners of aristocrats. This delusion of pride was, from the first, fatal to domestic happiness; for the convents had all the disadvantages of other boarding schools. The idleness that prevailed there was more terrible. The cloister bars inflame the imagination. Solitude is a condition very favorable to the devil; and one can scarcely imagine what ravages the most ordinary phenomena of life are able to leave in the soul of these young girls, dreamy, ignorant ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... hour! Ah, my little Miss Simplicity, champagne is not recorded at present on the repertory of your old manager, inspirer and friend. [He opens a wooden case and draws forth a bottle of wine.] But this old cloister vintage isn't to be sneezed at either! [He pulls the cork. At the same moment the door bell rings.] What? Sh! I wonder who has the monstrous impudence to ring here on Sunday afternoon? [The bell rings ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... other objects. Religion and its ministers possessed her wholly, and all her enthusiasm was spent on works of charity and devotion. Her father, passionately fond of her, resisted her inclination for the cloister, and sought to wean her back to the world; but she escaped from the chateau to a neighboring convent, where she resolved to remain. Her father followed, carried her home, and engaged her in a round of ftes and hunting parties, in the midst of which she found herself ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... city gates, a long street is before us with a colonnade or cloister on either hand; and at the end of this street, by turning to the left, we might go through the whole Ceramicus to the open country, and the groves of the Academy. But we turn to the right, and enter the Agora,—the market-place, as it ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... vows engag'd does stand For days, that yet belong to fate, Does, like an unthrift, mortgage his estate, Before it falls into his hand; The bondman of the cloister so, All that he does receive does always owe: And still, as time comes in, it goes away, Not to enjoy, but debts to pay! Unhappy slave, and pupil to a bell, Which his hour's work, as well as hours, does tell! Unhappy till the ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... faire Hermia question your desires, Know of your youth, examine well your blood, Whether (if you yeeld not to your fathers choice) You can endure the liuerie of a Nunne, For aye to be in shady Cloister mew'd, To liue a barren sister all your life, Chanting faint hymnes to the cold fruitlesse Moone, Thrice blessed they that master so their blood, To vndergo such maiden pilgrimage, But earthlier happie is the Rose distil'd, Then ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... summer term Oxford teaches the exquisite art of idleness, one of the most important things that any University can teach, and possibly as the first-fruits of the dreaming in grey cloister and silent garden, which either makes or mars a man, there has just appeared in that lovely city a dainty and delightful volume of poems by four friends. These new young singers are Mr. Laurence Binyon, who has just gained the Newdigate; Mr. Manmohan Ghose, ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... world in the sweet blossoming of an early May, the hedges spangled with primroses, and the hawthorns showing sheets of snow; while the pear trees lifted their snowy pyramids, and Lily in her white frock darted about the lawn in joyous play with her father under the tree, and the grey cloister was gay with wisteria. ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... other prison of condemned persons shall you go at three yron gates, the court paued and vauted round about, and open aboue as it were a cloister. In this cloister be eight roomes with yron doores, and in ech of them a large gallerie, wherein euery night the prisoners do lie at length, their feet in the stocks, their bodies hampered in huge wooden grates that keep them from sitting, so that they lye as it were in a cage, ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of - The English Nation, Vol. 11 • Richard Hakluyt
... after I came to New York Charles Reade and I kept up a close friendly correspondence, and he sent me proof-sheets of "The Cloister and the Hearth" in advance of its publication in England, so that the American reprint of the work might appear simultaneously therewith, which it did through my arrangements with Rudd & Carleton. He also sent me two of his own plays,—"Nobs and Snobs" ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... it was not all. The marquise, as we know, had taken refuge in a convent, where Desgrais dared not arrest her by force, for two reasons: first, because she might get information beforehand, and hide herself in one of the cloister retreats whose secret is known only to the superior; secondly, because Liege was so religious a town that the event would produce a great sensation: the act might be looked upon as a sacrilege, and might bring about a popular rising, during ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... of the Ile, which is called "the Cloister," has preserved the character of all cloisters; it is damp, cold, and monastically silent even at the noisiest hours of the day. It will be remarked, also, that this portion of the Cite, crowded between the flank of Notre-Dame and the river, ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... oldest inhabitants breathed a deep sigh of relief, when finally they were housed in the brand-new church up beside the college campus, a real stone church, with transepts and painted windows and choir-stalls within, and a cloister and a grand tall tower without. The ramshackle old wooden church had been dear to them, had even remained dear to them after the railroad had laid down its tracks under their very eaves; but they were fretted by the crudely caustic comments of strangers coming ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... Gunther, and yet, through his fault, lost her great treasure, her heart's dole was a thousand times worse than afore, and she was fain to be gone. A rich palace was built for Uta fast by the cloister of Lorsch. She left her children and went thither, and there she lieth ...
— The Fall of the Niebelungs • Unknown
... Chiavenna is a worthy key to this great gate Italian. We walked at night in the open galleries of the cathedral-cloister—white, smoothly curving, well-proportioned logge, enclosing a green space, whence soars the campanile to the stars. The moon had sunk, but her light still silvered the mountains that stand at watch round Chiavenna; and the castle rock was flat and black against that dreamy background. ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... was Fra Angelico—by reason of the angelic character which belonged to him and to his paintings; otherwise Fra Giovanni; he was a monk in a Dominican cloister. He entered the convent when he was twenty years old; and from that time, till he was sixty-eight, he served God and his ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... and unforced. It is astonishing that men like Ascham,[59] unless blinded by a survival of mediaeval or a foreshadowing of Puritan prudery, should have failed to see that the morality of the Morte d'Arthur is as rigorous as it is unsqueamish. Guinevere in her cloister and Lancelot in his hermitage, Arthur falling by (or at any rate in battle against) the fruit of his incestuous intercourse—these are not exactly encouragements to vice: while at the same time the earlier history may be admitted to have nothing of a crabbed ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... herself a new phase of change with regard to Logotheti, and she did not like it at all: he had become necessary to her, and yet she was secretly a little ashamed of him. In that temple of respectability where she found herself, in such 'a cloister of social pillars' as Logotheti called the party, he was a discordant figure. She was haunted by a painful doubt that if he had not been a very important financier some of those quiet middle-aged Englishmen might have thought ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... and we grew up together in my paternal halls. Yet differently we grew—I, ill of health, and buried in gloom—she, agile, graceful, and overflowing with energy; hers, the ramble on the hill-side—mine the studies of the cloister; I, living within my own heart, and addicted, body and soul, to the most intense and painful meditation—she, roaming carelessly through life, with no thought of the shadows in her path, or the silent flight of the raven-winged hours. Berenice!—I ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... that something had happened, for, contrary to their usual practice, they sat, thirty of them, in stony silence, waiting for me to begin the lesson. As far as I remember anything, they waited the whole hour. The lesson over, I passed along the cloister on my way to my rooms. I overheard one of my urchins, clattering in front of ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... Uffington, the Uffingas town. How the whole countryside teems with Saxon names and memories! And the old moated grange at Compton, nestled close under the hillside, where twenty Marianas may have lived, with its bright water-lilies in the moat, and its yew walk, "the cloister walk," and its peerless terraced gardens. There they all are, and twenty things beside, for those who care about them, and have eyes. And these are the sort of things you may find, I believe, every one of you, in any common English ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... change from the freedom and excitement of the university to the silence and monotony of the cloister had a depressing influence on a man like Luther, who, being of a nervous, highly-strung temperament, was inclined to pass quickly from one extreme to another. He began to be gloomy and scrupulous, and was driven at times almost to despair of his salvation; but Staupitz, the superior of the province, ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... of "definite proportions," and of the "chemical agency of electricity,"—principles of a high order, which have immortalized the names of their discoverers,—were not produced by the meditations of the cloister: nor is it in the least a reproach to those valuable institutions to mention truths like these. Fortunate circumstances must concur, even to the greatest, to render them eminently successful. It is not permitted ...
— Decline of Science in England • Charles Babbage
... out a characteristic of our great national poet that is rather unobtrusive than obscure. I mean a singular unworldliness of thought and feeling; a cherished idealism; an inborn magnanimity. Not the unworldliness of the study and the cloister, or the other-worldliness of such poets as Dante and Milton, but the unworldliness of a man of the world, the idealism that is closely allied with humour. And it is in this union and not elsewhere that the "breadth" of Shakespeare, ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... good part their honest gifts and oblations that they gave, to the intent I might buy such things as was necessarie for my body: for after I had made relation unto them of all my pristine miserie, and present joyes, I went before the face of the goddesse and hired me a house within the cloister of the temple to the end I might continually be ready to the service of the goddesse, and ordinarily frequent the company of the priests, whereby I would wholy become devout to the goddesse, and an inseparable worshipper of her divine name: It fortuned that the goddesse ...
— The Golden Asse • Lucius Apuleius
... convent, carried me through labyrinthine corridors and galleries, down long flights of subterranean stone steps, one after another, until I thought we could not be far from the centre of the earth, when he suddenly turned aside into a vast cloister with high arched openings and led me to one of them. Oh, the beauty, the glory, the wonder of the sight! We were halfway down the mountain-side, hanging between the blue heaven and the billowy Umbrian plain, with its verdure and its azure fusing into tints of dreamy softness ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... the attitude of these smellers after immortality is precisely that of the mediaevals who sought for the workings of divinity in eccentric variations from its own habits, till miracles became so commonplace that, as Charles Reade deliciously sums it up, a man in "The Cloister and the Hearth" could reply to his fellow, who was anxious to know why the market-place was black with groups, "Ye born fool! it is only a miracle." If I am to seek for "intimations of immortality," let me find them not in the haphazard freaks of disembodied ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... Miniato, situated without the city of Florence, with subjects from the lives of the Holy Fathers. While he was engaged on these works, the monks gave him scarcely anything to eat but cheese, of which the painter soon became tired, and being shy and timid, he resolved to go no more to work in the cloister. The prior sent to enquire the cause of his absence, but when Paolo heard the monks asking for him, he would never be at home, and if he chanced to meet any of the brothers of that order in the street, he gave ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... for herself or for her family, which remained in poverty. And with such pride as she possessed, such natural simplicity, such a desire to remain in the background, one can very well understand that she should have wished to disappear and cloister herself in some lonely spot so as to prepare herself to make a good death. Her work was accomplished; she had initiated this great movement scarcely knowing how or why; and she could really be of no further utility. Others were ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... of natural history; the small library; rooms for the librarian, for apparatus, and also another large theatre. The ground-floor consists of rooms for lectures, the Professor's offices, laboratory, museum, a spacious cloister 213 feet by 24; rooms for the anatomical school, &c. In the basement are other apartments for the anatomical schools, for the chemical laboratory, the students' common room, kitchen, stewards' room, refreshment rooms, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, No. - 361, Supplementary Issue (1829) • Various
... Taliesin was duly fulfilled. For Judik-Hael, the son of Jud-Hael, realized the bard's prediction, and entered the cloister ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... in itself worthless. When the man arises with a servant's heart and a ruler's brain, then is the summer of the Church's content. But whether the men who wrote the following songs moved in some shining orbit of rank, or only knelt in some dim chapel, and walked in some pale cloister, we cannot tell, for they have ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... guessed that the imagination could be so trained that when far from worldly conditions it could create a world of its own, and would shrink more and more from the practical realities. For Imagination has the instinct of a nun in its depths and loves the cloister of a picturesque solitude. It is a Fool's Paradise, but not inferior to the one which mortals are at liberty to enter ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... woman should carry the day. From the description our friend gives of her, Mother Marie-des-Anges is a small woman, short and thick-set, whose face is prepossessing and agreeable beneath its wrinkles and the mask of saffron-tinted pallor which time and the austerities of a cloister have placed upon it. Carrying very lightly the weight of her corpulence and also that of her seventy-six years, she is lively, alert, and frisky to a degree that shames the youngest of us. For fifty years she has governed in a masterly manner her community, which has always been the ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... thou and view it, All desolately sunk, The circle of the Druid, The cloister of the monk; The abbey boled and squalid, With its bush-maned, staggering wall; Ask by whom these were unhallow'd— Change, change hath done ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... wane. He was absent from her more frequently—spoke of the necessity of attending to his duty—his duty! oh, the ready excuse man finds to do evil. Better far for that poor girl would it have been to have been buried in the deepest recesses of the cloister, than to have attracted the notice of that vile unprincipled nobleman. It was about this time the old Earl died, and he quitted the service. There was no bar now for his acknowledging her as his wife—but he ...
— Edward Barnett; a Neglected Child of South Carolina, Who Rose to Be a Peer of Great Britain,—and the Stormy Life of His Grandfather, Captain Williams • Tobias Aconite
... river Moselle; steep hill-sides blooming with mystic forget-me-not where the glow of the setting sun cast long shadows down their eastern slope; an arch of clearest, deepest gentian bending overhead; in the centre of the aerial garden the walls of the cloister of Pfalzel, steel-blue to the east, violet to the west; silence over all,—a gentle, eager, conscious stillness, diffused through the air, as if earth and sky were hushing themselves to hear the voice of the river faintly murmuring down ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... only son of King Marsile, and drove the heathen before him as the hounds drive the deer. Turpin saw and applauded. "So should a good knight do, wearing good armour and riding a good steed. He must deal good strong strokes in battle, or he is not worth a groat. Let a coward be a monk in some cloister and pray for the ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... she blushed at her own ignorance. Amidst her noble and elegant manners, there is now and then a little touch of bashfulness and conventual rusticity, if I may call it so, that makes her quite enchanting. You see at once the rose that had bloomed untouched amid the chaste precincts of the cloister, Mr. Butler." ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... English mostly do not. We young people were easily taken with his glittering error, and we read him with much the same fury, that he wrote. 'Never Too Late to Mend;' 'Love Me Little, Love Me Long;' 'Christie Johnstone;' 'Peg Woffington;' and then, later, 'Hard Cash,' 'The Cloister and the Hearth,' 'Foul Play,' 'Put Yourself in His Place'—how much they all meant once, or ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... terminated only by the grave. To-morrow I go to L—— Castle, with feelings which I can compare only to those of the unfortunate La Valliere when she renounced her lover, and resolved to bury herself in a cloister.—Alas! why have not I ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... he shall find him here, he plies With greater speed his plumes of gilded scale, And deems as well that Peace, here guested, lies, And Charity and Quiet, without fail. But finds he is deceived in his surmise, As soon as he has past the cloister's pale. Here Silence is not; nor ('tis said) is found Longer, except in ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... hundred paces through a natural cloister of basalt until he arrived at a large uncovered court of the same formation, which a stranger might easily have been excused for believing to have been formed and smoothed by art. In its centre bubbled up a perpetual spring, icy cold; the ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... tradition any foundation in fact? Why not? Through his numberless works we may easily divine the soul of the artist, and can well understand, how the calm and serene atmosphere of the monastic cell, the church perfumed with incense, and the cloister vibrating with psalms, would develop the mystic sentiment in such ...
— Fra Angelico • J. B. Supino
... the Luxembourg, the erstwhile convents of the Visitation and the Sacre-Coeur, the cloister of the Oratorians, the Salpetriere, and the St. Lazare hospitals, and there was, of course, the Temple, and, lastly, the Conciergerie, to which those prisoners were brought whose trial would take place within the next few days, and whose ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... palace built three hundred years ago are a peculiar feature of modern Rome, and interest the stranger more than many things of which he has heard loftier descriptions. You pass through the grand breadth and height of a squalid entrance-way, and perhaps see a range of dusky pillars, forming a sort of cloister round the court, and in the intervals, from pillar to pillar, are strewn fragments of antique statues, headless and legless torsos, and busts that have invariably lost what it might be well if living men could lay aside in that unfragrant atmosphere—the nose. ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... not. Yet it seems to me that I hear the sound of my own feet walking upon cloister stones, and of my own voice lifted up in prayer ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard
... married, or being engaged! Standing on the threshold, Hanny shrank back in dismay. It was looking out of a tranquil cloister into a great, unknown world; and it gave her a mysterious shiver. She didn't feel safe and warm until she had dropped on her father's knee, and had his strong, fond ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... him. The match, too, is of Barbesieur's making: he it was that influenced my father to consent to it. I have already declared that, sooner than marry the marquis, I will take the veil. But my vocation is not for the cloister, and therefore I implore your highness's protection. I beseech you, give me the place made vacant by the marriage of your maid of honor, and save me from a life of misery. In my father's house I am solitary and unloved: but even loneliness of heart I could endure, if I were permitted to endure ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... this appeal; and indeed Riccabocca had never before thus reverently spoken of the cloister. In his hours of philosophy, he was wont to sneer at monks and nuns, priesthood and superstition. But now, in that hour of emotion, the Old Religion reclaimed her empire; and the sceptical world-wise man, thinking only of his child, spoke and felt ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... lingered in the pillared cloisters where the black-letter chronicles were written in Latin, and music was scored and hymns were composed, and many a rare manuscript was illuminated in crimson and blue and emerald and gold; and we looked through the fair arches into the cloister-garth where in the green sward a grave lay ever ready to receive the remains of the next brother who should pass away from this little earth to the glory of Paradise. What struck W. V. perhaps most of all was, that in some leafy places these holy houses were so ancient that even the blackbirds ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton
... scarcely more needful to each other, or more united. But—a hacking cough—a hectic cheek—a wasting frame, were to blue-eyed Mary the remorseless harbingers of death, and Eustace, standing on her early grave, was in heart a widower: henceforth he had no aim in life; the cloister was—so thought he, as many do—his best refuge, to dream upon the past, to soothe his present sorrows, and earn for a future world the pleasures lost in this. Time, the best anodyne short of what Eustace could not buy at Rome—true-healing godliness—alleviates his grief, and makes ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... Parnassus and Hippocrene, were all an abomination to him. In fancy I can almost hear him now exclaiming, "Harp? Harp? Lyre? Pen and ink, boy, you mean! Muse, boy, muse? Your nurse's daughter, you mean! Pierian spring? Oh, aye! the cloister pump, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... admiration while it aroused the indignation of his contemporaries, and a genius that compelled the attention of those who were most zealous to combat its evidences, Bruno, casting off the shackles of the cloister, that 'prigione angusta e nera,' boldly advanced a system of Philosophy, startling, in those Inquisitorial times, from its independence, and horrible from its antagonism to Aristotle, the Atlas of the church. This was no less than pure Pantheism,—God in and ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... literary power and noble sincerity. Kingsley is one of the first to feel the ground-swell of social democracy which was to sweep later fiction on its mighty tide. "Westward Ho!" is a sterling historical romance, one of the more successful books in a select list which embraces "The Cloister and the Hearth," "Lorna Doone," and "John Inglesant." "Hypatia," examined dispassionately, may be described as an historical romance with elements of greatness rather than a great historical romance. But it shed its glamour over our youth and there ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... ago, Amelie had left the ancient Convent of the Ursulines, perfected in all the graces and accomplishments taught in the famous cloister founded by Mere Marie de l'Incarnation for the education of the daughters of New France, generation after generation of whom were trained, according to her precepts, in graces of manner as well as in the learning ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby |
