"Cloister" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... O captain, Most earnestly I pray, That they may never bury me In church or cloister gray;— But on the windy sea-beach, At the ending of the land, All on the surly sea-beach, Deep ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... the scene. In the intervals between the hours of prayer and the observance of the round of cloister life, come hours for the copying of books under the presiding genius of Alcuin. The young monks file into the scriptorium, and one of them is given the precious parchment volume containing a work of Bede or Isidore or Augustine, or else some portion of ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... Niccola Pisano in the Duomo of Siena. I would rather, had it been possible, have given the pulpit by Giovanni Pisano in the Duomo of Pisa; but that pulpit is dispersed in fragments through the upper galleries of the Duomo, and the cloister of the Campo Santo; and the casts of its fragments now put together at Kensington are too coarse to be of use to you. You may partly judge, however, of the method of their execution by the eagle's head, which I have sketched from the marble in the Campo Santo (Edu., No. 113), and the lioness ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... 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 ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... declared her intention to turn "Religieuse;" and that Caussin ought to dispose the king's mind to see the wisdom of the resolution. It happened, however, that Caussin considered that this lady, whose zeal for the happiness of the people was well known, might prove more serviceable at court than in a cloister, so that the good father was very inactive in the business, and the minister began to suspect that he had in hand an instrument not at all fitted to ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... great Transitional choir was finished, Canterbury Cathedral remained till 1379. It is true that the north wall of the cloister and the lovely doorway in the north-east corner were built in the Early English time. It is equally true that the lower part of the Chapter House and the screens north and south of the choir and a glorious window in St Anselm's Chapel are Decorated work, but the Cathedral itself knows nothing ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... in the least his illustrious brother, it may truly be said that while the one was a saint in the cloister, the other was a saint in the very thick of life's battle. [Footnote: "Henry Newman... stood for a spiritual Tory; while Francis Newman was a spiritual Radical" (Morning Leader, October, 1897).] ... I would speak of him rather as the neighbour ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... ecclesiastics, but wanted peace at any hazard. Quarreling began first between individuals of the various factions, but it soon resulted in conflicts between civilians and the volunteer guard. The first step taken by the military was to seize and occupy the cloister, which lay just below the citadel, the final goal of their leader, whoever he was, and the townsfolk believed it was Buonaparte. Once inside the citadel walls, the Corsicans in the regular French service would, it was hoped, fraternize with their kin; with ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... this island of the sea. The surf beats at night. I lie and listen. Jane Stirling came to see us off. She brought violets—great, swelling English violets. I smell them in the mouldy cloister cells, night and day. This monks' home is cold and bleak. The wind rattles through it, and at night it moans. A chill is on me. When I cough it echoes through my heart. I love the light. Sweet music waits the light. I will not die. The shadow haunts. But life is strong. Jane's ...
— Unfinished Portraits - Stories of Musicians and Artists • Jennette Lee
... those that speak in favor of Messer Simone dei Bardi. It is the native, intimate, and commendable wish of a man to abolish his enemies—I speak here after the fashion of the worldling that I was, for the cell and the cloister have no concern with mortal passions and frailties—and Messer Simone was in this, as in divers other qualities, of a very manly disposition. He thought in all honesty that it would be very good for him to be the ruler of Florence, yet, also, and no less, ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... nor apart, Plunge in the thick of the fight. There in the street and the mart, That is the place to do right. Not in some cloister or cave, Not in some kingdom above, Here, on this side of the grave, Here, ...
— Custer, and Other Poems. • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... once on a time, Built as a death-bed atonement for crime: 'Twas for somebody's sins, I know not whose; But sinners are plenty, and you can choose. Though a cloister now of the dusk-winged bat, 'Twas rich enough once, and the brothers grew fat, Looser in girdle and purpler in jowl, Singing good rest to the founder's lost soul. But one day came Northmen, and lithe tongues of fire Lapped up the chapter-house, licked off the spire, And left ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... the secret path, and I had on my prettiest frock and my prettiest smile and my prettiest ways—as I told them all afterward at a dinner-party—pious goodness, with a relieving touch of the devil—just to tempt you out of your cloister and make you do what ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... freethinker. He was not a Royalist. In his character the noblest qualities of every party were combined in harmonious union. From the Parliament and from the Court, from the conventicle and from the Gothic cloister, from the gloomy and sepulchral circles of the Roundheads, and from the Christmas revel of the hospitable Cavalier, his nature selected and drew to itself whatever was great and good, while it rejected all the base and pernicious ingredients by which those finer elements were defiled. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... high virtues of poetry, impressed Rossetti in Browning. What a drama of the soul universal was revealed in that "fifty men and women"! What art, what music, coming down the ages, from Italy, from Germany, and what pictures from dim frescoes, and long-forgotten paintings hid in niche and cloister, were interpreted in these poems! How one follows "poor brother Lippo" ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... get back to Algiers, even if it meant walking. He longed to see once more Baia's blue corslet, his house, his fountain and to rest on the white tiles of his his little cloister while he awaited money to be sent from France. In these circumstances the camel did not desert him. This strange animal had developed an inexplicable affection for its master, and seeing him set out from Orleansville ...
— Tartarin de Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... architect. He built the delightful church of St. Michael, and its cloister. He also superintended the building of an important wall by the river bank in ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... was deprived of sight, went north to Nidaros, where he went into the cloister on the holm, and assumed the monk's dress. The cloister received the farm of Great Hernes in Frosta for his support. King Harald alone ruled the country the following winter, gave all men peace and ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
... perfume soon disclosed the virtues of the monk throughout the cloister, and when the blessed Gal, the Abbot of Yvern, departed from this world into the next, young Mael succeeded him in the government of the monastery. He established therein a school, an infirmary, a guest-house, a forge, work-shops of all kinds, and sheds for building ships, and he compelled ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... city, which might veritably be called a city of the dead. He turned aside into the cloisters, and listened mechanically while an old man discoursed to him in crabbed German concerning Fastrada's tomb and the carved face of the minstrel Frauenlob upon the cloister wall. Presently, however, the guide showed him a little door, and led him out into the pleasant grassy space round which the cloisters had been built. He was conscious of a great feeling of relief. The blue sky was above ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... theory of St. Augustine. Soon after, churchmen began to decree the penalty of imprisonment for heresy—a penalty unknown to the Roman law, and regarded in the beginning more as a penance than a legal punishment. It originated in the cloister, gradually made its way into the tribunals of the Bishop, and finally into the tribunals ...
— The Inquisition - A Critical and Historical Study of the Coercive Power of the Church • E. Vacandard
... instruction in counterpoint. The first composition of his was a sacred drama called "La Conversione di St. Guglielmo," written while he was still a student. It was performed with comic intermezzi (sic!) in the summer of 1731, at the cloister of St. Agnello. The dramatic element in this work is very pronounced, and the violin is treated with considerable feeling. His first opera, "La Salustia," was produced in 1731. It is notable for improvement in the orchestration. In the winter of this same year he wrote ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... was to be finished as an Easter offering to the Father Superior from devout ladies, who had been dismayed at the imagination of his discomfort. The verandah was granted the title of the Cloister, and the hours of recreation were now spent here instead of in the Library as formerly, which enabled studious ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... which brought most profit to the convent, was the chapel of Our Lady in this church, called Scala Celi, to which people were continually coming in pilgrimage, and offering at the altar there; most folks desiring to have masses sung for them here, or to be buried in the cloister of Scala Celi, that they might be partakers of the many pardons and indulgences granted by the Popes to this place; this being the only chapel (except that of the same name at Westminster, and that of Our Lady in St. Buttolph's church at Boston,) ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 25. Saturday, April 20, 1850 • Various
... about a 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 stream had worn a channel ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... a ledge of rock, and its upper portion not much less so, though smoothed into another order of stately architecture. Entering its court from the Via Larga, we found ourselves beneath a pillared arcade, passing round the court like a cloister; and on the walls of the palace, under this succession of arches, were statues, bas-reliefs, and sarcophagi, in which, first, dead Pagans had slept, and then dead Christians, before the sculptured coffins were brought ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... 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 ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... persons of the time, from the crowned heads of the period, through Luther and Aretine downwards, to give bait and attraction. Sometimes it reminds one of a working up of the Colloquies of Erasmus: three centuries earlier than The Cloister and the Hearth, with much less genius than Charles Reade's, and still more without his illegitimate advantage of actual novels behind him for nearly half the time. But it gives us "disjectae membra novellae" rather than a novel itself: and the oftener one reads it the more clear ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... near it the sedilia; whilst on the south side are the doorways which led to the dormitories of the monks engaged in the night services of the church. On the side next the river, a long line of building forms the eastern cloister and the crypt; on the same side is a handsome archway leading into the chapter-house, the roof of which is vaulted, groined, and supported by beautiful slender columns. Beyond are the remains of the refectory, ...
— Handbook to the Severn Valley Railway - Illustrative and Descriptive of Places along the Line from - Worcester to Shrewsbury • J. Randall
... Season, and allowing him his Expences at the Charge of the Society: One of our Kings, said my Friend, carried his Royal Inclination a little too far, and there was a Committee ordered to look into the Management of his Treasury. Among other Things it appeared, that his Majesty walking incog, in the Cloister, had overheard a poor Man say to another, Such a small Sum would make me the happiest Man in the World. The King out of his Royal Compassion privately inquired into his Character, and finding him a proper Object of Charity, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... nourished; into such a world that illustrious shepherd, Carlo Innocenze Frugoni, was born. He was the younger son of a noble family of Genoa, and in youth was sent into a cloister as a genteel means of existence rather than from regard to his own wishes or fitness. He was, in fact, of a very gay and mundane temper, and escaped from his monastery as soon as ever he could, and spent his long ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... opportunity to approach: nor is he restrained by any other consideration whatsoever. It is all one to him whether he himself has a wife of his own, or the lady a husband; whether she is designed for the cloister, or pre-ingaged to his best friend and benefactor. He takes it for granted that his addresses cannot but be acceptable; and, if he meets with a repulse, he condemns her taste; but never doubts ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... brothers, for the sake of our dear Land of the Blue Mountains, make the Gospodar Rupert, who has so proved himself, your King. And make me happy in my retirement to the cloister." ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... himself in a tiled hall, around which was built a staircase in varnished oak. There was a quadrangle, and from three sides the interminable latticed windows looked down on the green sward; on the fourth there was an open corridor, with arches to imitate a cloister. All was strong and barren, and only about the varnished staircase was there any sign of comfort. There a virgin in bright blue stood on a crescent moon; above her the ceiling was panelled in oak, and the banisters, the cocoa nut matting, the bit of stained glass, ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... of the earth was becoming a favorite belief, though it must be borne in mind that education in those days was confined to the cloister, and any departure from old founded tenets was regarded as heresy. It was this peculiar doctrine that caused Columbus much embarrassment in subsequent years. His greatest enemies were the narrow minds that regarded religion as the Ultima Thule of intellectual ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... men only, we should have been received in the convent, where there was a very handsome suite of rooms reserved for the purpose. But females could not enter the precincts of the cloister. The father in question very shortly made his appearance, a magnificent figure, whose long black beard flowing over his perfectly clean white robe made as picturesque a presentment of a friar as could be desired. He was extremely courteous, ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... May, When trees are green and bushes soft and wet; When the wind has stolen the shadows of new leaves And birds linger on the last boughs that bloom. Towards evening when the sky grew clearer yet And the South-east was still clothed in red, To the western cloister we carried our jar of wine; While we waited for the moon, our cups moved slow. Soon, how soon her golden ghost was born, Swiftly, as though she had waited for us to come. The beams of her light shone ...
— More Translations from the Chinese • Various
... heat of the August day brooded over the crowded city, and dulled the faint distant ring of arms and armour that yet would make itself heard above the hush; a hush which was not silence so much as a subdued hum. As Mademoiselle passed the closed house beside the Cloister of St. Germain, where only the day before Admiral Coligny, the leader of the Huguenots, had been wounded, she pressed her escort's hand, and involuntarily drew nearer to him. But he laughed ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... in private the examination of the spiritual authorities, and carried out their painful vocation beneath the protecting shadow of hallowed walls; but our suffering heroine had been cast forth from the cloister into the world at a time when pride, coldness of heart, and incredulity were all the vogue; marked with the stigmas of the Passion of Christ, she was forced to wear her bloody robe in public, under the eyes of men who scarce believed in the Wounds of Christ, far ...
— The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ • Anna Catherine Emmerich
... own fireside, caught the sound of a voice which he had not heard for years, and the fleeting glimpse of a woman's face which he had fondly loved. Had loved? Yes, still loved. Then the vision of convent walls, a Carmelite cloister, a sister kneeling at the shrine of the Blessed Virgin praying for him, and by her side, feeling her way to the altar rail, Mary, the little blind maid, repeating a fervent amen to her sister's petition; then—darkness about him, cold ashes on the hearth, and in his heart ...
— A Few Short Sketches • Douglass Sherley
... Cathedral to the south end of the Transept, a few yards south of which may be observed a range of Early English arches, each containing a double arch, which is again subdivided, but all have been long blocked up; this was a portion of what was called the "Dark Cloister." To the eastward of these is another range of arches with piers about twelve feet in height, some of which are comparatively perfect; these piers are alternately cylindrical and octagonal, the octagonal columns presenting alternately a side or an angle in front. ...
— Ely Cathedral • Anonymous
... "refused to march." After the amateur speechmaking and concert pieces an Italian violinist, who had thrown over a lucrative contract to become a soldier, played exquisitely; and one of the French sisters we had seen walking the deck with the mincing steps of the cloister sang; somewhat precariously and pathetically, the Ave Maria. Its pathos was of the past, and after she had finished, as we fled into the open air, we were conscious of having turned our backs irrevocably yet determinedly upon an era whose ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... but 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 which the marquise ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the young man from his black-walnut frame. He was the sainted predecessor of Dr. Marks, and the sanctity of his life of prayer and holy toil also lingered in this study. Old volumes and heavy tomes gave to it the peculiar odor which we associate with the cloister, and suggested the prolonged spiritual musings of the past, which are so out of vogue in the hurried, practical world of to-day. This study was, indeed, a quiet nook—a little, slowly moving eddy left far behind by the dashing, ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... the group made increased haste towards the lodge-gates, where an inspector and two constables could already be seen in consultation with the lodge-keeper. But the little priest only walked slower and slower in the dim cloister of pine, and at last stopped dead, on the steps of the house. It was his silent way of acknowledging an equally silent approach; for there came towards him a presence that might have satisfied even Calhoun Kidd's demands for a lovely and aristocratic ghost. It was a young woman in ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... the cloister connecting the Bishop's palace with the cathedral was begun by Bishop Lacy, who took great interest in the cathedral although he never visited his diocese. It was upon this work of the cloisters that 2800 marks were expended by Bishop ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Hereford, A Description - Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • A. Hugh Fisher
... to know the lady well. She has a good heart, but was ever muddle-headed. She thanked that wag with a smile, and I heard her later in the evening boring most evidently that literary lion with elongated praise of the "Cloister and the Hearth" and "Adam Bede." They were among the few books she had ever read, and talking about them came easily to her. She told me afterwards that she had found that literary ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... of Charity was standing by the King's bed. She had cared for him through many illnesses. In the intervals she retired to her cloister and read holy books and sewed for the poor. Even now, in her little chamber off the bedroom, where bottles sat in neat rows, covered with fresh towels, there lay a small gray flannel petticoat to warm the legs of one ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... in all points superior to the more ancient examples. We have above conducted our reasoning entirely on the supposition that a single aperture is given, which it is the object to fill with glass, diminishing the power of the light as little as possible. But there are many cases, as in triforium and cloister lights, in which glazing is not required; in which, therefore, the bars, if there be any, must have some more important function than that of merely holding glass, and in which their actual use is to give steadiness and tone, as it were, to the arches and walls ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... century one ordering his tomb of jasper and basalt in St. Praxed's Church, and his nineteenth century successor rolling out his post-prandial Apologia. 'My Last Duchess,' the 'Soliloquy in a Spanish Cloister,' 'Andrea del Sarto,' 'Fra Lippo Lippi,' 'Rabbi Ben Ezra,' 'Cleon,' 'A Death in the Desert,' 'The Italian in England,' ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... Christ, seek the 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 ...
— Three Addresses to Girls at School • James Maurice Wilson
... meanwhile, within and out of shot, dwelt in her private garden which she watered with grateful tears. It seems strange to say of this colourless and ineffectual woman, but she was a true enthusiast, and might have made the sunshine and the glory of a cloister. Perhaps none but Archie knew she could be eloquent; perhaps none but he had seen her - her colour raised, her hands clasped or quivering - glow with gentle ardour. There is a corner of the policy of Hermiston, where you come ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 to watch over the bay which ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... either side, by the hand of the illuminator Gherardo; and this because that church was dedicated to the said S. Giusto, and within it those friars preserved a relic of that Saint—that is, an arm. At the entrance of the convent was a little cloister of exactly the same size as the church—namely, forty braccia long and twenty wide—with arches and vaulting going right round and supported by columns of stone, thus making a spacious and most commodious loggia on every side. In the centre ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... the Bishops of Amiens; it lasted with them till the beginning of the fifteenth century. In Scotland the right was declared redeemable by King Malcolm III, towards the end of the eleventh century; in Germany, however, it continued in force much longer. According to the archives of a Swabian cloister, Adelberg, for the year 1496, the serfs, located at Boertlingen, had to redeem the right by the bridegroom's giving a cake of salt, and the bride paying one pound seven shillings, or with a pan, "in which she can sit with her buttocks." In other places the bridegrooms ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... Conte di Montefeltro, a celebrated soldier of that day, became a Franciscan in his old age, in order to repent of his sins; but, being consulted in his cloister by Pope Boniface on the best mode of getting possession of an estate belonging to the Colonna family, and being promised absolution for his sins in the lump, including the opinion requested, he recommended the holy ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... eastward lies the sacred Isle of Putu, the Iona of the China coast. With a noble landscape, and so little land as to offer no temptation to the worldly, it was inevitable that the Buddhists should fix on it as a natural cloister. For many centuries it has been famous for its monasteries, some of which are built of timbers taken from imperial palaces. Formerly the missionaries from neighbouring seaports found at Putu refuge from the summer heat, but it is now abandoned, since it afforded no shelter from the petty ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... 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
... Isidore of Seville (History of the Goths, Vandals and Suevi), Bede (Ecclesiastical History of England), Paulus Diaconus (History of the Lombards), and others. Of the many historians of the middle ages, besides the authors of biographies, chronicles, cloister annals, &c, may be mentioned Haymo, Anastasius, Adam of Bremen, Ordericus Vitalis, Honorius of Autun, Otto of Freising, Vincent of Beauvais and Antoninus ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... receipt of this letter the city formally surrendered on the 10th of July. The great bell was tolled, and orders were issued that all arms should be brought to the town hall, that the women should assemble in the cathedral and the men in the cloister of Zyl. Then Don Frederick with his staff rode into the city. The scene which met their eyes was a terrible one. Everywhere were ruins of houses which had been set on fire by the Spanish artillery, the pavement had been torn up to repair the gaps in the walls, unburied bodies of men and women ...
— By Pike and Dyke: A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic • G.A. Henty
... The Cloister Tea Rooms were above a pastry cook's on the first floor of one of the old houses in The Precincts. The irregularly shaped room provided several secluded: tables, and they took one in a remote corner. But their ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... the schools; and, though we can never be too grateful for their existence, and the fidelity with which they preserved the knowledge of other days, that is surely a higher attainment in the life of the race, when the learning of the world exceeds the learning of the cloister, the ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... beaten track. It was founded in 1164 by the Lord Rhys, near the site of an older monastery. It was endowed with large expanse of lands, mostly mountain pastures, and the monks soon began building their church and refectory and cloister. The monastery was completed in 1201, when "the monks came to the new church, which had been erected of splendid workmanship." The architectural details of this church are peculiar and almost unique. Mr. S. ...
— Mediaeval Wales - Chiefly in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries: Six Popular Lectures • A. G. Little
... and end their days in peace. Those with whom the world had dealt hardly, or those whom it had surfeited with its unsatisfying pleasures, those who were disappointed with earth, and those who were filled with passionate aspirations after heaven, alike found a haven of rest in the quiet cloister. And, gradually, lands came to them, and wealth, and social dignity—all gratefully extended to men who deserved so well of their fellows; while no landlords were more popular than they, for the sanctity of the monks sheltered ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... been tempted to romance in any form; never but once had sentiment interfered with a passionless transfer of scientific notes to the sanctuary of the unvarnished note-book or the cloister of the juiceless monograph. Nor have I the slightest approach to that superficial and doubtful quality known as literary skill. Once, however, as I sat alone in the middle of the floor, classifying my isopods, I was not only astonished but ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... was overshadowed on one side by a very high discoloured wall, stained, and streaked green, as with seaweed—evidently the high-shouldered sentinel of some great gentleman's estate. A yard or two from the wall ran parallel to it a linked and tangled line of lime-trees, forming a kind of cloister along the side of the road. It was under this branching colonnade that the two fugitives fled, almost concealed from their pursuers by the twilight, the mist and the leaping zoetrope of shadows. Their feet, though beating the ground furiously, made but a faint noise; for they ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... already in an excited and imaginative mood. He has been impressed by the cathedral wall as it loomed over the low streets, before he looks up to the carving of its porch—and his love of mystery has been touched by the silence and the shadows of the cloister, before he can set himself to decipher the bosses on its vaulting. So that when once he begins to observe your doings, he will ask nothing better from you, nothing kinder from you, than that you would meet this imaginative temper of his half way;—that you would farther ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... (1298-1328) erected a new chapter-house, and the old one was made a vestibule to the new. South of the early chapter-house was probably the fratery; on the upper floor of this building and the chapter-house was the dormitory—a wheel-stair leading to it from the south transept. On the west side of the cloister was the sub-prior's house, known also as Senzie House; south-east of the fratery is the prior's house or Hospitium Vetus, which was sometimes the residence of the bishop. West of the cathedral are the remains of the ...
— Scottish Cathedrals and Abbeys • Dugald Butler and Herbert Story
... for the life of the cloister, the home of learning and contemplation in those days, wherein alone were libraries to be found, and peaceful hours to devote to their perusal. He learned his lessons with such avidity as to surprise and delight his teacher, his leisure hours were spent in the library of ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... Edith's hand; 'Wilt thou be Queen of all the land?' —O red she blush'd and proudly! Red as the crimson girdle bound Beneath her gracious breast; Red as the silken scarf that flames Above his lion-crest. She lifts and casts the cloister-veil All on the cloister-floor:— The novice maids of Romsey smile, And ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... her head upon her hands, and then looking at herself in the glass, murmured, "It has been truly said, that a woman who has truly loved is always young, and that the bloom of the girl of twenty years ever lies concealed in some secret cloister ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... clanged at last, indicating the end of the period. Three or four boys went forward to confer with Mr. Beaver about certain vexing algebraic problems. Needless to say, neither Burton nor Harrington was among these. They drifted out into the cloister with the rest of the class, having certain problems of their own, not algebraic. One or two boys addressed Burton and were rebuffed with a curt word, which was unusual, as Burton was almost painstakingly ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... skull against a wall," he had said in those hours of confidence; "and, to be as sublime a blockhead, if you'll allow me the word, you, my dear fellow, have kept sounding the charge. We've sat prating here of 'success,' heaven help us, like chanting monks in a cloister, hugging the sweet delusion that it lies somewhere in the work itself, in the expression, as you said, of one's subject or the intensification, as somebody else somewhere says, of one's note. One has been going on in short ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... lodge.[7] Passing through this gateway, the spectator sees, on his right, a long line of buildings, of the age of the original foundation, for the use of the brethren, each of whom has a house and garden to himself. On the left is an ambulatory, or cloister, 135 feet in length, and extending to the church on the south-east. Above the ambulatory is the ancient infirmary, and chambers called the Nuns's rooms, from their having been allotted to three hospital sisters on the foundation of Cardinal Beaufort. The ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 569 - Volume XX., No. 569. Saturday, October 6, 1832 • Various
... of Mademoiselle de Roannez was not a happy one. After vacillating for some time between the cloister and the world—obeying the guidance of Pascal, either directly or through Madame Périer, and even passing through her novitiate at Port Royal with “extraordinary fervour”—she was persuaded to marry and ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... of Tarragona it happened I cannot say, but Diard presently recognized by its architecture the portal of a convent, the gate of which was already battered in. Springing into the cloister to put a stop to the fury of the soldiers, he arrived just in time to prevent two Parisians from shooting a Virgin by Albano. In spite of the moustache with which in their military fanaticism they had decorated her face, he bought the picture. ...
— Juana • Honore de Balzac
... a supernatural discipline was imposed, it was only because experience and faith had disclosed a situation in which the pursuit of earthly happiness seemed hopeless. Nature was not destroyed by its novel appendages, nor did reason die in the cloister: it hibernated there, and could come back to its own in due season, only a little dazed and weakened by its long confinement. Such, at least, is the situation in Catholic regions, where the Patristic philosophy has not appreciably varied. Among Protestants Christian dogma has taken a new ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... injurious form of unchastity. For there are many ways of avoiding pregnancy besides the use of contraceptives, and such ways can often only be called vicious, destructive to purity, and harmful to health. Our ideal woman to-day is not she who is deprived of freedom and knowledge in the cloister, even though only the cloister of her home, but the woman who, being instructed from early life in the facts of sexual physiology and sexual hygiene, is also trained in the exercise of freedom and self-responsibility, and able to be trusted ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... sparkling summer clover; While the great and stately treen Their rich rood-screen hang over! For my bier-cloth blossomed may Outlay on eight green willows! Sea-gulls white to bear my pall Take flight from all the billows. Summer's cloister be my church Of soft leaf-searching whispers, From whose mossed bench the nightingale To all the vale chants vespers! Mellow-toned, the brake amid, My organ hid be cuckoo! Paters, seemly hours and psalm Bird voices calm re-echo! Mystic ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves
... all his ideals and dreams—for he had romanced about his sometime English possession as he had never dreamed of woman. It had once been the property of the Church, and the ruin of cloister and chapel above the ancient wood was sharp against the low pale sky. Even the house itself was Tudor, but wealth from generation to generation had kept it in repair; and the lawns were as velvety, the hedges as ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton
... villas, grayish-white and dim, slid past the windows with a continuous and gentle motion. Great iron gateways came in view from time to time, through which you caught a glimpse of an avenue of lofty beech trees, or some verdant cloister inhabited by antique statues, or a long green arcade pierced here and there by a laughing ray ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... by no means incompatible with the duties of life. It is possible to be "diligent in business," but "fervent in spirit, serving the Lord." We contend not for a voluntary seclusion from society, seeking the retirements of the cloister or the retreats of the wilderness: but we plead with you, whatever situation you occupy, to set God always before your eyes, to act as in his sight, and daily to realize the true character of saints as "strangers ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... Rickman, an architect whose lectures and published treatises had given him a wide reputation, was entrusted with the work. The new buildings were not an artistic success, in spite of the elaborate Gothic cloister, with its stupendous gateway and the imposing scale of the whole pile. Their deficiencies might be masked or at least diminished if ivy were allowed to cover the unpleasing wall spaces, and perhaps if these lines are ever read by the proper authority such ...
— Beautiful Britain—Cambridge • Gordon Home
... convinced that no nun in cloister was as hopelessly certain of safety from world and flesh and devil as was her heart and its meditations, under the aegis of ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... fortunate readers. For the first time in our lives, we have enjoyed the delight of seeing at the house of a friend one of the grand pictures of MURILLO, which was obtained by a distinguished connoisseur at Lima, in 1828, from the cloister of an old convent, where it had hung for countless years in ignoble seclusion. It had probably been brought from Spain during the life-time of the painter, as it is not described by any of his biographers, who have carefully enumerated ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... than a year in an agony of irresolution. I have decided at last. I have lived a melancholy life; a lonelier life than is passed in the cloister. I have had no one to confide in; no one to advise me; no one to save me from the horrors of my existence. I have found a brave and prompt friend at last. Shall I ever forget the heroic tableau ...
— The Room in the Dragon Volant • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... gladly, and she led them through devious paths till there was a shout from Hallin, and the most poetic corner of a famous garden revealed itself. Amid the ruins of a cloister that had once formed part of the dissolved Cistercian priory on whose confiscated lands Castle Luton had arisen, a rich medley of flowers was in full and perfect bloom. Irises in every ravishing ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... silence pervaded these long and deserted cloister-passages. It seemed as if a death-veil lay upon the whole building—as if it were depopulated, desolated. Nowhere the least trace of that busy, stirring life, usually prevailing in these corridors—no longer those bands of scholars that formerly peopled these passages—the ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... Passing through a large antechamber containing several nuns, who bowed to the ground as he passed, he ran rather than walked to a reception-room, which, it must be confessed, bore but little trace of that austerity which is ordinarily ascribed to the interior of a cloister. ...
— The Regent's Daughter • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... the Abbaye and 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 ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... the parents was asked to the matrimonial selection of the mistress, but public opinion required some very strong reason to justify them in withholding it. The only exception to this arrangement was when girls were destined for the cloister, and in that case they received their education in a convent. But there was one person who had absolutely no voice in the matter, and that was the unfortunate girl in question. The very idea of consulting her on any point of it, would have struck a mediaeval mother with ...
— A Forgotten Hero - Not for Him • Emily Sarah Holt
... arms of the cross: the southern one we have just visited, the northern we leave for our return. From here we can observe the architectural features, and point out that the west aisle of the south cross is cut off by the eastern walk of the cloister, a singular arrangement, due probably to the fact that the ancient Norman {55} cloister, which stood long after the building of Henry the Third's church, was already in this position. Between the triforium and the roof of this cloister is a vaulted chamber, called the Muniment Room, where some ...
— Westminster Abbey • Mrs. A. Murray Smith
... eye, as it is known, devils can fly hundreds of miles: so that almost the same beat of the clock which left these two in Champagne, found them hovering over Paris. They dropped into the court of the Lazarist Convent, and winded their way, through passage and cloister, until they reached the door of the ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... to my aid; but my religious sentiments were, at that time, tinctured with the enthusiasm of my early character. Had I been a Catholic, I should have escaped from my friends and thrown myself into a cloister; as it was, I had formed a strong wish to retire from that world which was no longer anything to me: the spring of passion, which I then thought the spring of life, being broken, I meditated my resolution secretly and perpetually as I ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... he confessing himself to me that, though under arms, he was a young fledgeling priest in Popish orders, I began upon him with such words on his disgracing the noble profession of arms as might have made him choose to return to his cloister; when suddenly he fled, and, being young and light-footed, robbed me, not only of such caduacs and casualties as an experienced cavalier might well take from his prisoner for ransom, but also, as now it appears, of my good name. For I doubt not that this musketeer priest, ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... both described pretty well the four walls in Tampico where Anastasio Murguia tarried. Excepting the porter's lodge at the entrance, the establishment's only roof formed an open corridor against one of the walls, in which species of cloister the human guests were privileged to spread their blankets in case of rain or an icy norther. Otherwise they slept in the sky-vaulted court among the four-footed transients, for what men on the torrid Gulf coast would allow his beast more fresh air ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... book department the other day. A flapper came in and said she had forgotten the name of the book she wanted, but it was something about a young man who had been brought up by the monks. I was stumped. I tried her with The Cloister and the Hearth and Monastery Bells and Legends of the Monastic Orders and so on, but her face was blank. Then one of the salesgirls overheard us talking, and she guessed it right off the bat. ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... race. If so, it deserves a greater esteem than now-a-days is put upon it." His return to England after the Restoration was soon followed by his marriage his settlement in a house in St. Catherine's Cloister, near the Tower, which devolved to my grandfather and his introduction into the Heralds' College (in 1671) by the style and title of Blue-mantle Pursuivant at Arms. In this office he enjoyed near fifty years the rare felicity of uniting, in the same pursuit, his duty and inclination: his ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... embrace each other anew.] Carpe diem! Enjoy the passing 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 with increased violence.] Confound it all—the fellow must be a lunatic. ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... every sacred fane Call its sad votaries to the shrine of God, And, with the cloister and the tented sod, ...
— Poems of Henry Timrod • Henry Timrod
... endurance to those who are treading with bleeding feet on the stones. And so it remains to all time a lasting record of human needs and human consolations; the voice of a brother who, ages ago, felt and suffered and renounced,—in the cloister, perhaps, with serge gown and tonsured head, with much chanting and long fasts, and with a fashion of speech different from ours,—but under the same silent far-off heavens, and with the same passionate desires, the same strivings, the same ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... order of the holy Prior, drubbed forth of the sacred precincts. So brother Anselm became Giles o' the Bow—the kind Saints be praised, in especial holy Saint Giles (which is my patron saint!). For, heed me—better the blue sky and the sweet, strong wind than the gloom and silence of a cloister. I had rather hide this sconce of mine in a hood of mail than in the mitre of a lord bishop—nolo episcopare, good brother! Thus am I a fighter, and a good fighter, and a wise fighter, having learned 'tis better to live to fight than ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... leader; a son of the wisest and firmest ruler the kingdom has yet acknowledged." It was agreed, therefore, by the people, that he should be invited to come, and a summons was sent from Metz, the then capital of the district, to the cloister at Cologne. Young and brave, pining in uncongenial society, and debarred from the employment of his talents, Charles seized this opportunity of release. Eagerly accepting the invitation, he hastened to ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... Spain. Her sister Anne soon after died, and Philip II., her morose and debauched husband, having already buried four wives, and no one can tell how many guilty favorites, sought the hand of his young and fresh niece. But Margaret wisely preferred the gloom of the cloister to the Babylonish glare of the palace. She rejected the polluted and withered hand, and in solitude and silence, as a hooded nun, she remained immured in her cell for fifty-seven years. Then her pure spirit passed ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... ordinary use occupy twenty large chambers. The five elementary school-rooms are each fifty feet square, the kitchen is eighty-three feet square, and the fencing-hall and garden adjoining contain together over sixty-six hundred square feet. The cistern under the cloister is of nearly the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... the second floor," as Bunker says) the carpet is again grass, and Bunker and I clamber through a little archway into the cloister gallery, where the monks used to look down on the service below when they felt inclined. The ladies look after us, brave adventurers that we are (only two or three million men have been here before us, perhaps, since the ruin became a popular success), ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... the utility of Idaho woods for this particular use. Transparencies and mounted photographs illustrated the vast forest resources of the State. Around the court a row of heavy columns supported the overhanging roof, and a wide cloister behind the columns, paved with brick, afforded a charming resting place. At the close of the exposition the building was sold to a citizen of Texas, who is to have it reerected on his ranch, and it will still bear the name ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... the green cloister, folding us within. The leaves are audible—our ear to win; They whisper of the realm of old Romance. Of sunny Spain, and of chivalric France; And poor Ramona's love and her despair, Thrill, like Aeolian harp, the twilight air— So the ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... great white drift against the new green of a crimson-starred burning bush, while over it all trailed the perfume-laden honeysuckle which bowered the front porch, decorated trellis and trees and finally flung its blossoms down the hill to well-nigh cloister Rose ...
— Rose of Old Harpeth • Maria Thompson Daviess
... indeed committed, and went to the doom, exulting that his death saved the life he had given, not in vain! I saw women, young, delicate, in the bloom of their beauty; they had vowed themselves to the cloister. Hands smeared with the blood of saints opened the gate that had shut them from the world, and bade them go forth, forget their vows, forswear the Divine one these demons would depose, find lovers and helpmates, and be free. And some of these young hearts had loved, and even, though ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... should go to bed. La Godegrand soon came back with a hop, skip, and jump, as the Tourainians say, from the church of St Martin, from which she was not far, since the Rue de Hierusalem touches the walls of the cloister. She entered her house, laid down her prayer-book, chaplet, and rosary, and other ammunition which these old girls carry, then poked the fire, and blew it, warmed herself at it, settled herself in her chair, and played with her cat for want of something better; then she ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... all bare and scathed across their leafy arms, as if unwilling to disturb the general repose by the crash of their fall. Vistas of silence opened everywhere, into the heart and innermost recesses of the wood; beginning with the likeness of an aisle, a cloister, or a ruin open to the sky; then tangling off into a deep green rustling mystery, through which gnarled trunks, and twisted boughs, and ivy-covered stems, and trembling leaves, and bark-stripped bodies of old ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... Asimilar sentimental regard is cherished in this family for the doves, which no one killed, because no one could eat them. Even as Yorick meets a Franciscan, Jacobi encounters a Jesuit whose heart leaps to meet his own, and later, after the real journey is done, avisit to a lonely cloister gives opportunity for converse with a monk, like Pater ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... 1441-1451 by Domenico Veneziano and in conjunction with Andrea del Castagno. That he was commissioned to complete the series at a later date (1460) is certain. In 1462 Alessio was employed to paint the great fresco of the Annunciation in the cloister of the Annunziata, which still exists in ruined condition. The remains as we see them give evidence of the artist's power both of imitating natural detail with minute fidelity and of spacing his figures in a landscape with a large sense of air and distance; and they amply verify ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... was overtaken by a shower of rain as he returned home from a friend's house, where he had been passing the evening. He therefore crossed, as quickly as his corpulence would allow, the deserted little square called "The Cloister," which lies directly behind the chancel of the cathedral of Saint-Gatien ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... the lapse of time has been inordinately great, we experience a desire to revert to old habits. We say that old associations crowd upon us. Let a Trinity man, after thirty years absence from Cambridge, pace for five minutes in the cloister of Neville's Court, and listen to the echo of his footfall, as it licks up against the end of the cloister, or let an old Johnian stand wherever he likes in the third Court of St. John's, in either case he will find the thirty years drop out of his life, as if they were half-an-hour; his ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... duties," she singled out this one and that, whom Alicia had asked to meet her, and mentioned them to him with a warm pleasure in implying one of the advantages of belonging to the world rather than to the cloister. Stephen knew their names and their dignities. He received what she said with suitably impressed eyebrow and nods of considerate assent. Hilda carried him along, as it were, in their direction. She was full that night of a triumphant sense of her own vitality, her success ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... world that she forsook. Fair too she was, and kind had been As she was fair, but ne'er had seen For her a timid lover sigh, Nor knew the influence of her eye. Love, to her ear, was but a name, Combined with vanity and shame; Her hopes, her fears, her joys, were all Bounded within the cloister wall: The deadliest sin her mind could reach Was of monastic rule the breach; And her ambition's highest aim To emulate Saint Hilda's fame. For this she gave her ample dower, To raise the convent's eastern tower; For this, with carving rare and quaint, She decked the chapel of the saint, And gave ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... one; and may all the earthly happiness I once dreamed of, with none of the bitter alloy it has been my lot to experience, be henceforth yours. You will know me no more. With to-morrow's sun, I travel to a distant cloister, where the world, with its tantalizing loves and dazzling ambitions, will be nothing more to me forever. Farewell, Claud! farewell, gentle, heroic maiden! farewell, afflicted, happy mother! If the prayers of Avis Gurley have virtue, their first ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... cry, Could he not let a bad example die? The world was fallen into an easier way; This age knew better than to fast and pray. Good sense in sacred worship would appear 1020 So to begin, as they might end the year. Such feats in former times had wrought the falls Of crowing Chanticleers[133] in cloister'd walls. Expell'd for this, and for their lands, they fled; And sister Partlet,[134] with her hooded head, Was hooted hence, because she would not pray a-bed. The way to win the restive world to God, Was to lay by the disciplining ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... arises, not from the mode in which the power was exercised, but from the way in which it was defended. The mediaeval writers were accustomed to generalise; they disregarded particular circumstances, and they were generally ignorant of the habits and ideas of their age. Living in the cloister, and writing for the school, they were unacquainted with the polity and institutions around them, and sought their authorities and examples in antiquity, in the speculations of Aristotle, and the maxims of the civil law. They gave to their political doctrines as abstract a form, ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... of the arm of the procurator's wife, as a bark yields to the rudder, arrived at the cloister St. Magloire—a little-frequented passage, enclosed with a turnstile at each end. In the daytime nobody was seen there but mendicants devouring their crusts, and ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... gay striped linen cloth, about which some people, mostly women and children, were moving quietly, looking at the goods exposed there. The ground floor of the building round the quadrangle was occupied by a wide arcade or cloister, whose fanciful but strong architecture I could not enough admire. Here also a few people were sauntering or sitting reading on ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... omens dissatisfaction with present surroundings, and you will soon seek new environments. For a young woman to dream of a cloister, foretells that her life will be made unselfish by the ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... books, too, man must be studied, but more especially face to face, in constant, earnest observation. The preacher must get out and about. A recluse he cannot afford to be. Pale-faced piety cultivated in the cloister may be admirably adapted for Sunday exhibition, but is apt to prove rather ineffective when brought into active service in week-day tasks. Wisdom waits to be gathered in every place where men do congregate. Earnestly must the preacher listen ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... 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 writing, ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... The little Essex priest spoke the more simply, with his round face turned to the strengthening stars; the other talked with his head bowed, as if he were not even worthy to look at them. But no more innocently clerical conversation could have been heard in any white Italian cloister ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... detached from the world, till she asked her husband to allow her to enter an Ursuline convent. Champlain, fearing that this desire might arise rather from caprice than a vocation for the life of the cloister, thought it advisable to refuse her request, and he bade her a last adieu in 1633. After Champlain's death, Father Le Jeune informed her that she was now free to follow the ...
— The Makers of Canada: Champlain • N. E. Dionne
... altar-piece, before which a priest, assisted by a boy, officiates, and to the left is a strongly-barred window connected with the interior of the convent. Behind this window, which is heavily curtained as well as railed, stand the nuns and other inmates of the cloister, who have come to take part in the ceremonies. The responses are chanted by this invisible congregation in a subdued tone. During a certain portion of the ceremonies, the curtain is partially drawn, and the outline of a thickly veiled ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... mole on her cheek and the sidelong Look, as she ambled forth with her buckets of bronze at her shoulder, Swinging upon the yoke to and fro, a-drip and a-glimmer. All in an instant was changed, and once more the cloister was peopled By the serene monks of old, and against walls of the cloisters, High on his scaffolding raised, Pordenone[5] wrought at his frescos. Armed with dagger and sword, as the legend tells, against Titian, Who was his rival in art and ...
— Poems • William D. Howells
... the thoughts, and hands, and powers of labouring citizens and warrior kings. By the monk it was used as an instrument for the aid of his superstition; when that superstition became a beautiful madness, and the best hearts of Europe vainly dreamed and pined in the cloister, and vainly raged and perished in the crusade,—through that fury of perverted faith and wasted war, the Gothic rose also to its loveliest, most fantastic, and, finally, most foolish dreams; and in those dreams, ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... hair-grown hermit sunk The saner brute below; The naked Santon, hashish-drunk, The cloister madness of the monk, The ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... and all the gossip rout. O senseless Lycius! Madman! wherefore flout The silent-blessing fate, warm cloister'd hours, And show to common eyes these secret bowers? The herd approach'd; each guest, with busy brain, Arriving at the portal, gaz'd amain, And enter'd marveling: for they knew the street, Remember'd it from childhood all complete Without a gap, ...
— Lamia • John Keats
... Audience, the Diwan-i-Khas, more beautiful than the first. It is of white marble, which, in this clear atmosphere, remains white, and it is richly ornamented with gilt. It is in the form of a square cloister or arcade, with a little dome at each corner, and if we stand inside and look out between the white pillars to see the lawns and the trees in the old palace gardens, we shall find it difficult to realise that this place of beauty and peace was ever a ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... "amoris desiderium"—the thirst of the soul for God—which is the characteristic note of mystical devotion; in others, that longing for a safe refuge from the provoking of all men and the strife of tongues, which drove so many saints into the cloister. Many a solitary ascetic has prayed in the words of the 73rd Psalm: "Whom have I in heaven but Thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire beside Thee. My flesh and my heart faileth: but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever." And verses like, "I will hearken what the Lord ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... to gloss over this incident, by alleging that a private marriage had taken place between the lovers: but King Alphonso, who was well-nigh sainted for living only in platonic union with his wife Bertha, took the scandal greatly to heart. He shut up the peccant princess in a cloister, and imprisoned her gallant in the castle of Luna, where he caused him to be deprived of sight. Fortunately, his wrath did not extend to the offspring of their stolen affections, the famous Bernardo del Carpio. When the youth had grown up to manhood, Alphonso, ...
— Mediaeval Tales • Various
... Benches on either side, and paved very handsomely with Marble, covered in the middle with a rich Turkey Mat, and sheltered from the heat of the weather by a kind of Veil, expanded by Ropes from one side of the Parapet-wall, or Lattice of the Flat Roof, to the other. So into a little Cloister running round this Court, and up a little winding stone Staircase into another Cloister or Upper Gallery. Then at a Door all covered with rich Filigree-work in Gold and Colours did the Negress knock; and by and by a soft silvery Voice, of which the sound, somehow, made me start ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... was answered by a gesture of despair from the young man. Then he went up the court towards the Hall, entered the flagged passage, looked for a moment at the notices on the screen, and went through into the back court, which was surrounded by a tiny cloister. ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... years of age. Both of them immediately made the acquaintance of Ninon and Madame de la Saliere, and, astonished at the profound merit they discovered, deemed it to their advantage to frequent their society for the purpose of adding to their talents something which the study of the cloister and experience in the king's cabinet itself had never offered them. Abbe Gedoyn became particularly attached to Mademoiselle de l'Enclos, whose good taste and intellectual lights he considered such sure and safe guides. His gratitude ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... our qualms of conscience have degenerated into mere twinges. Oaths are shorn of their might by overuse; confound, once a tremendous malinvocation, may now fall from the lips of respectable young ladies, and fie, in its time not a whit less dire, would be scarcely out of place in even a cloister. Words designating immediacy come to have no more strength than soup-meat seven times boiled. Presently meant in the present, soon and by and by meant forthwith. How they have lost their fundamental meaning will be intelligible to you if you have ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... world that here a DILLON rests. One, who in beauty's prime forsook the world, And, self-bereav'd of all it holds most dear, Retir'd, to pass the pilgrimage of life, In solemn prayer and peaceful solitude. Ah, vain desire! Ambition's scowling eye Must see the cloister, as the palace, low, And meek-ey'd Quiet quit her last abode, Ere he can pause to look upon the wreck, And rue the wild impatience of ...
— Elegies and Other Small Poems • Matilda Betham
... from their black scapularies, and black veils over their white garments, appeared to be professed nuns of the order of Mount Carmel; and as many whose veils, being white, argued them to be novices, or occasional inhabitants in the cloister, who were not as yet bound to it by vows. The former held in their hands large rosaries, while the younger and lighter figures who followed carried each a chaplet of red and white roses. They moved in ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... Chester and saw the Cathedral, which is not of the first rank. The Castle. In one of the rooms the Assizes are held, and the refectory of the Old Abbey, of which part is a grammar school. The master seemed glad to see me. The cloister is very solemn; over it are chambers in which the ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... and which exhibits itself curiously in the "Vita Nuova." Corresponding with the new ardor for the arts, and in sympathy with it, was a newly awakened and generally diffused ardor for learning, especially for the various branches of philosophy. Science was leaving the cloister, in which she had sat in dumb solitude, and coming out into the world. But the limits and divisions of knowledge were not firmly marked. The relations of learning to life were not clearly understood. The science of mathematics ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... had had her dreams of the convent. But a picture of this kind was a better warning than any sermon which a hot-headed Protestant ever preached. There are natures which can put forth blossoms, pale and sweet, in the air of the cloister, and there are others which can flower only in the ...
— A Vanished Hand • Sarah Doudney
... mission, and lose no time between London and Paris. Her postscript was the oddest part of all. It was a grave recommendation to discover you, in whatever height or depth of the capital you might exist; whether you figured in the court or the cloister; were the idol of the maids of honour, or the model of the monks of La Trappe; to remind you that you had forgotten every body on the other side of the Channel who was worth remembering, including ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... change was not in that age to be accounted for but by a miracle. It was asserted and believed that the Holy Virgin, touched with his great desire to become learned and famous, took pity upon his incapacity, and appeared to him in the cloister where he sat almost despairing, and asked him whether he wished to excel in philosophy or divinity. He chose philosophy, to the chagrin of the Virgin, who reproached him in mild and sorrowful accents that he had not ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... search for us. Who knows but even now the officers of the law are upon our track? Your family is all-powerful—I am a mere nobody—we should be crushed if they discover us. They would bury you in a gloomy cloister, and I should be tried as a common thief, or as a vile assassin.' My only answer was: 'Let us go! Let us ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... husband and the charms of the wife,' with a sombre, cynical side-glance at the velvet cushions of the unhappy couple. Then came the departure; cold good-byes were exchanged under the arches of the little cloister, and a sigh of relief with 'Well, that's over,' escaped the Duchess, said in the despairing, disenchanted accent of a woman who has measured the abyss, and leaps in with her eyes open only to keep ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... on the 18th of July 1504. He studied at Emmerich and Cologne, where the teaching of Peter Lombard led him, through Augustine and Chrysostom, to first-hand study of the Bible. Next the writings of Luther and Melanchthon appealed to him. Appointed teacher (1522) in the cloister school of Cappel, he lectured on Melanchthon's Loci Communes (1521). He heard Zwingli at Zuerich in 1527, and next year accompanied him to the disputation at Berne. He was made pastor of Bremgarten in 1529, and married Anna Adlischweiler, a nun, by whom he had eleven children. After the battle ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... the Arabs (as may be seen by a reference to it in the Perfumed Garden), while, as Hyrtl mentions (loc. cit. ii, p. 94), rue (Ruta graveolens) was considered a sexual sedative by the monks of old, who on this account assiduously cultivated it in their cloister gardens to make vinum rutae. Recently heroin in large doses (see, e.g., Becker, Berliner Klinische Wochenschrift, November 23, 1903) has been found to have a useful effect in this direction. It may be doubted, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... help her in her misery. But always she had been afraid, because she thought that the Queen might remember her only as one that had wronged her childish innocence. For she remembered that the maids' dormitory at the old Duchess's had been no cloister of pure nuns. So that, at best, she was afraid, and she sent her yard-worker and a shepherd a great way round to fetch the larger boat of two to ferry over the Queen's men. Then she went indoors to redd up the houseplace ...
— The Fifth Queen Crowned • Ford Madox Ford
... slaughter, and many a fat hog did they set down to roast before the fire; many a jar, too, did they broach of my father's wine. Nine whole nights did they set a guard over me taking it in turns to watch, and they kept a fire always burning, both in the cloister of the outer court and in the inner court at the doors of the room wherein I lay; but when the darkness of the tenth night came, I broke through the closed doors of my room, and climbed the wall of the outer court after passing ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... further connection with Fulford. He hoped, even if unable to see Randall, to obtain help on behalf of an English lad in danger, and happily he arrived at a moment when State affairs were going on, and Randall was refreshing himself by a stroll in the cloister. When Lucas had made him understand the situation, his dismay was only equalled by his promptitude. He easily obtained the loan of one of the splendid suits of scarlet and crimson, guarded with black velvet a hand broad, which were worn by the Cardinal's secular attendants—for he ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... priest, speaking as if to the floor. "She has no more place than if she had dropped upon a strange planet." He suddenly looked up with a brightness which almost as quickly passed away, and then he looked down again. His happy thought was the cloister; but he instantly said to himself: "They cannot have overlooked that choice, except intentionally—which they have a right to do." He could do nothing but shake ...
— Madame Delphine • George W. Cable |
