"Seclusion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... I will never believe he could be so ungallant. But Hilda, I hear that really you live in positive seclusion, like a nun without a convent. My dear, how tragic, to pass your best years in this way! I told mamma that I should positively implore you to come to me this winter, and she said it was my DUTY. To think of YOU, Hilda, forswearing ...
— Hildegarde's Neighbors • Laura E. Richards
... teacher went out and did not turn up again until evening, when he retired immediately to the seclusion of ...
— Tillie: A Mennonite Maid - A Story of the Pennsylvania Dutch • Helen Reimensnyder Martin
... sat unusually silent during the discussion on the possibilities of Siberian Magic; after lunch he side-tracked Lord Pabham into the comparative seclusion of the billiard-room and delivered himself of a ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... something unheard of, had happened to the austere republican. To the man who heretofore had proudly resisted the blandishments of beautiful women, they said he had fallen in love with that wondrously lovely and strange lady who had been at Rastadt for the last few weeks, but who was living in such seclusion that the public had only occasionally got a sight of her. No one knew who this strange lady was. and what she wanted at Rastadt; she had paid visits to no one, and left her card nowhere. She had arrived only attended by a footman and a lady's maid; but in advance, a brilliant suite of rooms ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... the opera and theater, attended concerts and lectures, and Sir William was both surprised and delighted to notice how readily Virgie adapted herself to the requirements of society and etiquette, notwithstanding the seclusion of ...
— Virgie's Inheritance • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... of administering affairs of a higher order than those that concern merely the weal and woe of the individual, he administers them with sublime indifference amid the tumult of war, the bustle of business, or the raging of a plague—indeed, he pursues them into the seclusion of ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... to tempt him, we yet see distinctly enough that the vanity of wishing to be singular, in both the parts that he plays, had some share in his liberal self-forgetfulness, as well as in his anchoritical seclusion. This is particularly evident in the incomparable scene where the cynic Apemantus visits Timon in the wilderness. They have a sort of competition with each other in their trade of misanthropy: the Cynic reproaches the impoverished Timon with having been merely driven by necessity to take ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... readers of PUNCH, we have it in command to announce, that on Saturday, Nov. 27th, the first chapter of a series under the title of the "Puff Papers," appropriately illustrated, will be commenced, with a desire to supply the hiatus in periodical fiction, occasioned by the temporary seclusion of one of the most popular novelists ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 20, 1841 • Various
... to give up hope, he would feel obliged to return the envelope to the box from which he had taken it. Were its loss discovered, he would of course be searched, and kept in stricter seclusion than before. ...
— The Young Bank Messenger • Horatio Alger
... centuries. Thither the young couple repaired to pass their honeymoon; the enamoured bridegroom gladly availing himself of the opportunity to ingratiate himself with his new connexion, by adopting the seclusion he saw practised by the English on such occasions. However consonant to our notions of happiness, and however conducive to our enjoyment this custom be—and I have strong doubts upon the subject —it certainly prospered ill with the volatile Frenchman, who pined for Paris, its cafes, its boulevards, ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... library of such dignity and beauty that one instinctively, and properly, thinks of it as an institution rather than a mere building. To enjoy the Athenaeum one must be a "proprietor" and own a "share," which entitles one not only to the use of the scholarly volumes in scholarly seclusion, but also in the afternoon to entrance to an alcove where tea is served for three pennies. Perhaps here, as well as any other place, you may see a characteristic assortment of what are fondly called "Boston types." There is the professor from Cambridge, ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... mourn over the departed scion in the chambers above these solemn abodes, screened by dark and silent groves from the public eye." Another tradition devotes the edifices to a sect of priests, whose duty it was to live in perfect seclusion, and offer expiatory sacrifices for the royal dead who reposed ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... the fact that Tabor itself was at that time the site of a fortified town containing a Roman garrison, combine in this instance to discredit tradition. One of the spurs of Herman must therefore be the alternative and more probable scene of the Transfiguration; the seclusion of this district of mountain, valley, and woodland providing opportunity for contemplation, and preparation for the end which was now imminent, "the decease which Jesus was to ...
— The Life of Jesus Christ for the Young • Richard Newton
... Greece. But Aspasia cannot be taken as a type of the Hetaerae of Greece. That these women, by the variety and freedom of their life, may and must have acquired certain qualities of character and mind that could hardly be developed in the seclusion of the Greek home, may readily be admitted; we know, for example, that they cultivated music and the power of conversation; and were welcome guests at supper-parties. But we have no evidence that the relations which they formed rested as a rule on any but the ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... upon our seclusion here? You know my anger is no slight thing," broke out Cuchullain, in ready wrath hiding his confusion. The shadow of Emer turned, throwing back the long, fair hair from her face the better to see him. There was ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... unduly flattered. Roger de Seras continued. "Just to please them I have made any number of applications to the governor of the prison, but there was nothing doing, my dear chap; that beast of a magistrate, Fuselier, insists on your being kept in absolute seclusion. But none the less, I've got some news for you. I know heaps: why, my friends at the Law Courts call me 'the peripatetic paragraph!' Not bad, eh, what?" Gurn smiled and Roger de Seras was encouraged. "It's given me no end of a boom, my leader ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... romance gilds for me the sober tableland of that cold New England hill where I came in contact with a world so strange to me, and destined to leave such mingled and lasting impressions. I looked across the valley to the hillside where Methuen hung suspended, and dreamed of its wooded seclusion as a village paradise. I tripped lightly down the long northern slope with facilis descensus on my lips, and toiled up again, repeating sed revocare gradum. I wandered' in the autumnal woods that crown the "Indian Ridge," much wondering ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Melanesian and Polynesian classes. They are split up into numerous dialects, so widely different that natives of different districts can hardly, if at all, understand each other. It is evident that owing to the seclusion of the villages caused by the general insecurity of former days, and the lack of any literature, the language developed differently in ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... occasion, when Malcolm had been more than usually censorious, Dick challenged him to a fight. They adjourned to the seclusion of a small plot of grass by a great oak, where the Etonian knocked Dick down five times in succession, afterwards escorting him to the cook, who placed raw beefsteak on ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... this request, and took Lady Neville with her to England. She treated her with great consideration and honor; but still Lady Neville maintained a strict reserve in all her intercourse with the other ladies of the court, and kept herself in great seclusion, especially after the arrival of the bridal party in England. Her pretext for this was her deep affliction at the loss of her friend and patroness the Dauphiness of France. But the other ladies of the court were not wholly satisfied with this explanation. They were fully convinced that ...
— Margaret of Anjou - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... sight?" This question displays the general feeling of the nation for the "good old king." Although the latter part of his life had been a blank, his people had never lost sight of him: their interest had not been wearied by his long seclusion, nor had their love expired in the flood of victories that distinguished the regency. The least information concerning him was read with avidity, while the tear of pity and affection rolled down the cheeks of the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... carts, unless, indeed, the little news-carrier should fail to board us with the world's daily bulletin, or our next-door neighbor should be deterred from coming to sit by the blazing, excited fire, and interchange the trifling, harmless gossip of the day. The feeling of seclusion on such a day is sweet, but the true friend who does brave the storm and come is welcomed with a sort of enthusiasm that his arrival in pleasant weather would never excite. The snow-bound in their Arctic hulk are glad to ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... especially Hindu, society, that it would be difficult for the State to take any vigorous initiative without running a great risk of alarming and alienating native opinion[21]. Owing to Indian social customs and to the practice of early marriage or at least of early seclusion, for girls, their education presents immense practical difficulties which do not exist in the case of boys. Hence the slow progress it has made. At the last census only eight per thousand women could read and write; and in the whole of India only about half a million girls, or four out of every 100 ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... a serious and inventive writer engaged in congenial literary activities in a private retreat. We see this period marked by the creation of some of the most virile passages of a Work dealing exclusively in red corpuscles and huge primal impulses. We see this thoughtful man dragged from his calm seclusion to a horrifying publicity; forced to adopt the stage and, himself a writer, compelled to exploit the repulsive sentiments of an author not only personally distasteful to him but whose whole method and school in belles ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... one in upon a house of dreams, full of intimate and ghostly voices. It is a house of peace, where music is still that refreshment which it was before it took fever, and became accomplice and not minister to the nerves, and brought the clamour of the world into its seclusion. ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... But a more decisive reason with many gentlemen who love retirement is, that from the island becoming every year more and more attractive with pleasure-parties, an unlimited admission of strangers would at once annihilate all the charms of rural seclusion; it would in fact be converting the flowery walks of a quiet country-villa into as giddy a promenade as almost any popular tea-garden in the suburbs of the metropolis. Still however, speaking generally, ...
— Brannon's Picture of The Isle of Wight • George Brannon
... attraction. Very simple, perhaps; but he had lived lonely for many years since his wife's death, and judged the hearts of others, most of all of his brother's son, by his own. He had often thought whether, in case of Elsie's dying or being necessarily doomed to seclusion, he might not adopt this nephew and make him his heir; but it had not occurred to him that Richard might wish to become his son-in-law for the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the use of the writ of habeas corpus? If a sane person were confined in an asylum, how could he be got out? Could a person who had taken religious vows imposing seclusion from the world, be released by means of this writ? Show the necessity of power to suspend the writ in cases of ...
— Studies in Civics • James T. McCleary
... compact parts,—a compact part on which, as it might certainly be brought into use let the debate have gone as it might, he had expended great care. He had flattered himself that there was something of real strength in his words as he repeated them to himself in the comfortable seclusion of his own room, and he had made them so ready to his tongue that he thought it to be impossible that he should forget even an intonation. Now he found that he could not remember the first phrases without unloosing and looking at a small roll of paper which he held furtively in his ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... furious knight smashed a wild boar, and he could lift his horse one palm off the ground by holding to a tree branch. The estate has been wilfully wasted by certain of his descendants. Comacha, famous for picnics, is a hamlet rich in seclusion and fine air; it might be utilised by those who, like the novel-heroes of Thackeray and Bulwer, deliberately sit down to vent themselves ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... and in which their actual use is to give steadiness and tone, as it were, to the arches and walls above and beside them; or to give the idea of protection to those who pass along the triforium, and of seclusion to those who walk in the cloister. Much thicker shafts, and more massy arches, may be properly employed in work of this kind; and many groups of such tracery will be found resolvable into true colonnades, with the arches in pairs, or in triple or quadruple groups, and with small rosettes pierced ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... time she sat with closed eyes, her little ivory prayer-beads in her hands. She pleaded for pardon for not being able to fix her attention on holy things, and asked grace to cease thinking of him who had taken from her the love for the life of seclusion to which she had been taught ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith
... about her waist, and when she became too fluent increased the pressure until she gasped for breath. Much impressed by these signs of affection she began to yield, and, leaning her head against his shoulder, voluntarily renewed her vows of seclusion. ...
— Salthaven • W. W. Jacobs
... corner of the carriage thought on; of how Lionel's father on his wife's desertion of him had gone to the dogs, rushing into all kinds of mad dissipation up to the time of his wife's death, when he became a confirmed misanthrope, living in absolute seclusion until his own death some two years agone; while going to destruction for distraction's sake, poor man, he had reduced his income to about L8,000 per annum. Before his death he had imbued Lionel with a distrust ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... so persistently with her mother troubled him a good deal, for he did not think such close seclusion on her part could be ...
— The Bittermeads Mystery • E. R. Punshon
... dark corners of misery and oppression, closely he drew about him the dust-gray filaments, soft as silk and stubborn as steel, until he lay death-stiffened in mummied seclusion. ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... men from the sophomores and seniors, giving many anxious and worried moments to the younger students over the outcome of the one important event of the year. It had also been the custom to try to capture the president of the freshman class and hold him in seclusion until after the banquet, thereby making his opening speech impossible. The dread that they should lose their leader became more and more apparent among the banquet holders as the days advanced, and extensive plans had been made to protect Frederick Graves from his class ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... of bliss, 550 And by each other, till to love and live Be one:—or, at the noontide hour, arrive Where some old cavern hoar seems yet to keep The moonlight of the expired night asleep, Through which the awakened day can never peep; 555 A veil for our seclusion, close as night's, Where secure sleep may kill thine innocent lights: Sleep, the fresh dew of languid love, the rain Whose drops quench kisses till they burn again. And we will talk, until thought's melody 560 Become too sweet for utterance, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... nobody seems to know exactly what has become of him. He was sent for to Rome, and has never been heard of since. One report is, that he has been condemned to some mysterious penal seclusion by his ecclesiastical superiors—another, that he has volunteered, as a sort of Forlorn Hope, to accept a colonial curacy among rough people, and in a pestilential climate. I asked his brother, the sculptor, about him a little ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... given the same sullen answer to every visitor for four weeks, shutting herself up in stern seclusion, determined that, whatever cruel comments they made, the neighbourhood should have no power of spying into the mystery of "that poor Mrs. Locke Harper who did not live happy with her husband." For so she felt sure had been the result of that fatal betrayal to her ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... had been first shown. It was on the back of the house, and only half lighted by the few rays of afternoon sun that struggled through the dense foliage outside. I suppose this apartment had been chosen as the scene of the interview on account of its seclusion. Outside the window, which was closed, a sowar paced slowly up and down to keep away any curious listeners. A heavy curtain hung before the door through which we had entered. I thought that on the whole the place ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... took everybody by surprise when the customary advertisement appeared in the newspapers. Foreseeing the unfavorable impression that might be produced in some quarters, Stella had pleaded for a timely retreat to the seclusion of Romayne's country house. The will of the bride being, as usual, the bridegroom's law, ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... condemnation will admit of some abatement. Besides, who shall penetrate into the recesses of the heart, into the hidden secrets of the immature mind of a young girl brought up, probably, in the most absolute seclusion and ignorance of the world, in order to know what idea she might have formed to herself of marriage? Perhaps she thought that to marry this old man meant to devote her life to his service, to be his nurse, to soothe ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... political matters, and was personally withdrawn from Germany, whose affairs were more or less controlled by an Imperial Council in which Frederick of Saxony was the guiding spirit; popular sentiment was on Luther's side, and the Worms edict was practically a dead letter. But the seclusion of the great Reformer threw the movement largely into the hands of extremists such as Carlstadt and Muenzer to whose anarchical theories he was opposed as vehemently ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... rifle and bundle of cartridges and hold the Lovcen (a high mountain) against all comers. The originality of his threat gained him his freedom. Since then he has kept a closer guard over that unruly member and only unburdened himself in the seclusion of the Club. Otherwise P., myself, and a young and intensely patriotic Scotchman completed the list of ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... perhaps still are, two very fine ones at S. Peter's by the same monks. In the same monastery of the Angeli is a quantity of very ancient embroidery, done in a very fine style, with excellent designs by the fathers of the house while they were in perpetual seclusion, with the title not of monks but of hermits, and who never came out of the monastery as the nuns and monks do in our day. This practice of seclusion lasted until 1470. But to return to D. Lorenzo. He taught ...
— The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors & Architects, Volume 1 (of 8) • Giorgio Vasari
... college life in common—of the "halls,'' and the general social life which they promote; of the "commons'' and "combination rooms,'' which give a still closer relation between those most directly concerned in university work; of the quadrangles, which give a sense of scholarly seclusion, even in the midst of crowded cities; and of all the surroundings which give a dignity befitting these vast establishments. Still more marked progress in my ideas was made during my attendance at the Sorbonne and the ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... had scarcely spoken a word of our language for more than a year and a half. It seemed sad to hear that she never went out, because she did not care to go 'covered up,' and that such had been the seclusion of her existence, that she scarcely knew any animals by sight, except from pictures, and had no pets, except, as she said, 'pet books.' She showed me the books gained as prizes at college by her two nephews, with evident appreciation ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... purpose she gave herself the worst cold she could achieve, and cherished diligently what she proudly considered to be a racking cough. But Miss Frederick was deaf to the latter, and only threatened the usual upstairs seclusion and senna-tea for the former, whereupon Marcella in alarm declared that her cold was much better and gave up the cough in despair. It was her first sorrow and cost her some days of pale brooding and silence, and some nights of stifled tears, when ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... instance of seclusion," she added, "there are features very different from our own case. We are not forced to impoverish our blood with insufficient diet, or mortify our flesh with various forms of punishment. We do not neglect the worship ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Marryat
... origin lies deep in the character of the Chinese races and in the traditions of their Government. The Taiping rebellion and the opening of Chinese ports to foreign trade and settlement disturbed alike the homogeneity and the seclusion of China. ...
— Messages and Papers of William McKinley V.2. • William McKinley
... of Sekeletu up. They could not cure him, and pronounced the disease incurable. An old doctress from the Manyeti tribe had come to see what she could do for him, and on her skill he now hung his last hopes. She allowed no one to see him, except his mother and uncle, making entire seclusion from society an essential condition of the much longed-for cure. He sent, notwithstanding, for the Doctor; and on the following day we all three were permitted to see him. He was sitting in a covered wagon, which was enclosed ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... the life of the spirit, is not to seek cloistered seclusion, but to enter into all the great opportunities, the difficulties, the privileges, or the penalties, that attend every real endeavor. In this, alone, does one find the life more abundant. In this, alone, lies the secret ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... know, monsieur?" the waiter answered. "Only it seems that this place is a little distance from Paris, it is retired, one finds seclusion here. People meet, I think, in these gardens who do not care to be seen in Paris. There are some come here who whisper at the door to monsieur le proprietaire that their names must ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... December, and set men and women alike laughing cruelly over the fall of Countess Caroline's carefully constructed age, which was announced, en haute voix, by her nephew, at a ball. At the same time, it was also, in all probability, this same incident, that saved poor Nathalie another year of seclusion and prayers. For, had not the world already found her out, it is scarcely probable that the gay Countess, arrived at the actual hour of abdication, would have had the courage to bid her youth good-bye, and take up her place behind ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... place some time during the night. No one knew when. Carter came and went through a side entrance formerly used by delivery wagons when they brought Sarah Mosely her meagre household supplies. He remained in seclusion there, as modest as a girl, and only Susan Walton knew with what diligence he laboured. No man dared to seek him in the seclusion of that place. And when Mike Prim called him over the 'phone, after the first issue of the Signal under the ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... monsignore, which is unusual with me, and scarcely equal to such a theme, doubtless of the deepest interest to me and to all. I myself wish, as you well know, that all mankind were praying under the same roof. I shall continue in seclusion this morning. Perhaps you will permit me to think over what you have said with so much ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... the collections of amateurs."—"I am glad," he answered, "that you like such works. The door is much more beautiful inside. Come in, if you like." My heart, in some degree, failed me. The mysterious dress of the porter, the seclusion, and a something, I know not what, that seemed to be in the air, oppressed me. I paused, therefore, under the pretext of examining the outside still longer; and at the same time I cast stolen glances into the garden, for a garden it was which had opened before me. Just inside the ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... boom of a minute-gun. Archer contemplated with awe the two slender faded figures, seated side by side in a kind of viceregal rigidity, mouthpieces of some remote ancestral authority which fate compelled them to wield, when they would so much rather have lived in simplicity and seclusion, digging invisible weeds out of the perfect lawns of Skuytercliff, and playing Patience together in ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... be glowing The imaging mind mated in equal limbs, Thought visible in lines of the athlete, Wisdom persuading in the lover's clasp. And how should thought know thought until the whole Of body's beauty is by body learnt? Until the trial of that most dear seclusion Is past, and all the dangers of mere lust Disproved, when in possession is no stale Regret and disillusion, how should be known That the still hours of thought with thought are stable Against the wearing of dissolving time? Dear, we must love by all the ...
— Preludes 1921-1922 • John Drinkwater
... said—"I am not much in the habit of maintaining my own words,—however, in this case I am willing to admit them true. If it will be any relief to your mind, Miss Faith, I will promise to remain in seclusion until you say I am fit to be seen ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... unquestionable fact was that of his extraordinary seclusion. Nobody in the village, no student in the University, knew his history. No young lady in the Corinna Institute had ever had a word from him. Sometimes, as the boats of the University or the Institute were returning at dusk, their rowers would ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... enliven Olivia's mansion during the play: Olivia herself, calm, cheerful, of "smooth, discreet, and stable bearing," hovering about them; sometimes unbending, never losing her dignity among them; often checking, oftener enjoying their merry-makings, and occasionally emerging from her seclusion to be plagued by the Duke's message and bewitched by his messenger: and Viola, always perfect in her part, yet always shrinking from it, appearing among them from time to time on her embassies of love; sometimes a partaker, sometimes a provoker, ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... indicate in the newspapers by an expressive black line; and on this "beat," more than on most others, the night police were chosen from men of mighty strength to protect the sober part of the street community, and of notable cunning to persuade the drunken part to retire harmlessly brawling into the seclusion ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... palace embowered among lovely orange-trees, only a few steps from the sea, and in full view of the myrtle and laurel groves which deck the isles of Sainte Marguerite. He told me that he proposed spending a few months here in seclusion, so as to give me time to accustom myself to my new position and the luxury that surrounded me. I was, indeed, extremely awkward, and my excessive timidity was increased by my pride. I did not know what to say, or what to ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... of one of those vast sylvan tracts wherein Norman kings once hunted, and Saxon outlaws plundered; and although the plough had for centuries successfully invaded brake and bower, the relics retained all their original character of wildness and seclusion. Sometimes the green earth was thickly studded with groves of huge and vigorous oaks, intersected with those smooth and sunny glades, that seem as if they must be cut for dames and knights to saunter on. Then again ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... in the Tracts for the Times, twenty-nine of which were written by Newman, and in his Parochial and Plain Sermons (1837- 1843). After nine years of spiritual conflict Newman retired to Littlemore, where, with a few followers, he led a life of almost monastic seclusion, still striving to reconcile his changing belief with the doctrines of his own church. Two years later he resigned his charge at St. Mary's and left the Anglican communion,—not bitterly, but with a deep and tender regret. His ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... himself enforced to withdraw from the public gaze. There were rough people who were impertinent and timid people who turned out of their road to avoid him, so that he found his out-door walks and meditations almost confined to the night, unless he chose the grave-yard for its seclusion or strolled on the beach and listened to the wallowing and grunting of the Black Boars—the rocks off shore that had laughed on the night when the York witch went up the chimney in a gale. But his life was long and kind and useful, ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... besides. He was exceedingly good natured, but his manners at first appeared to me rather awful. He is living in a very comfortable country house, surrounded by fir and oak trees, which alone in so open a country, give a most charming air of seclusion and comfort. He appears to find time for everything; he showed us a pretty garden full of Cape bulbs of his own collecting, and I afterwards understood that everything was the work of his own hands...I am very stupid, and I have nothing more to say; ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... female," the cruel caging of the pretty birds who are supposed to be forever longing and pining for the gossip of the ghaut and the bustle of the bazaar, the only fault she had to find with it was that she did not get enough of it. The well-trained Hindoo woman has been taught to regard such seclusion as her most charming compliment, and a precious proof of her husband's affection; to be kept jealously veiled from the staring world, is associated in her mind with ideas of wealth and rank,—it is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... simulative of death occur. Organisms will, for example, learn to meet very rigorous conditions if slowly introduced, and not permanent. A transitory period of want can be tided over by contrivance. The lily withdrawing its vital forces into the bulb, protected from the greatest extremity of rigour by seclusion in the Earth; the trance of the hibernating animal; ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... about your superiority to poverty. You are so particular, you know; now, you are finding fault with Timon for opening the door to you and letting you wander at your own sweet will, instead of keeping you in jealous seclusion. Yesterday it was another story: you were imprisoned by rich men under bolts and locks and seals, and never allowed a glimpse of sunlight. That was the burden of your complaint—you were stifled in deep darkness. We saw you pale and careworn, your fingers hooked with coin-counting, ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... a symbol of the way evolution is done? Did the Law keep in reserve a Sishta or Seed-Race from Lemuria, holding it back from Atlantean development during the whole period of the Atlanteans;—holding it, all that while, in seclusion and purity —and therefore in a kind of pralaya;—at the right moment, to push its development, almost suddenly, along a new line, not parallel to the Atlantean, but sui generis, and to be Aryan Fifth presently?—Is the ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... shaken, stairs and passages thoroughly brushed and wiped, we polished the windows with cloths dipped in ammonia water and wrung out, and followed them by a dry rubbing with soft linen cloths. Then it was time to restore the furniture to its place, and bring out the ornaments again from their seclusion. ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various
... There was a lasting intimacy between the two namesakes, and they seem to have been involved together in some important passages of their lives; but we have Edmund Burke's authority for believing that they were probably not kinsmen. The seclusion of these rural sojourns, originally dictated by delicate health, was as wholesome to the mind as to [v.04 p.0826] the body. Few men, if any, have ever acquired a settled mental habit of surveying human affairs broadly, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... different kinds of small goods, each having a room of its own. This was a new thing on the coast and was fully appreciated by the large number of patrons who took advantage of the opportunity to try instruments in comparative seclusion. In 1904 the largest holder of stock, Mr. Roy Mauvais, who was actively engaged in looking after the interests of the firm desired to concentrate his energies in furthering other lines of business in which he had engaged, and found more congenial. At this time an offer from the Wiley ...
— Sixty Years of California Song • Margaret Blake-Alverson
... a poem by Tennyson, in four parts. Pt. i. tells us that the lady passed her life in the island of Shalott in great seclusion, and was known only by the peasantry. Pt. ii. tells us that she was weaving a magic web, and that a curse would fall on her if she looked down the river. Pt. iii. describes how Sir Lancelot rode to Camelot in all his bravery; and the lady gazed at him as he rode ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... ever again adorn any like document. Franklin was old and gray. He had signed the Declaration, the Treaty of Alliance, and now the Treaty of Peace. He had done his work in writing well. It had ended well. Seventy-six years old; surely he would rest now at Passy, or return to some Philadelphia seclusion and await the change that must soon ...
— True to His Home - A Tale of the Boyhood of Franklin • Hezekiah Butterworth
... special attention is called to its cosiness, and then it is necessary to mount an accumulation of great water-rounded rocks in order to obtain convincing evidence of its actual reality. It is a long, narrow room, shut in by a straight wall sufficiently high for rigid seclusion, or protection, without preventing a glimpse of ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... Olives" was begun in 1800, and finished during the following year. Beethoven never remained in Vienna during the summer. The discomforts of the city and his intense love for Nature urged him out into the pleasantly wooded suburbs of the city, where he could live and work in seclusion. Upon this occasion he selected the little village of Hetzendorf, adjoining the gardens of the imperial palace of Schoenbrunn, where the Elector, his old patron, was living in retirement. Trees were his delight. In a letter to Madame von Drossdick, he says: "Woods, trees, and rocks give the response ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... final word I could make no rejoinder. With a reverence unmingled with the taint of compassion, I took my departure, and being anxious by this time to know how my young charge was bearing her seclusion, I went to the room where I had left her, and softly ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... and our car had been some monster cast up from a Barbary shipwreck; and the startled attitudes of these holy women did credit to their sense of the picturesque; for the Abbey of Neuville is now a great Belgian hospital, and such monsters must frequently intrude on its seclusion... ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... was fresh, and everybody was hunting for new examples of the style, Glapthorne had the doubtful luck to be made the subject of a very laudatory article in the Retrospective Review, and two of his plays were reprinted. He was not left in this honourable but comparatively safe seclusion, and many years later, in 1874, all his plays and poems as known were issued by themselves in Mr. Pearson's valuable series of reprints. Since then Glapthorne has become something of a butt; and Mr. Bullen, in conjecturally attributing to him a new play, ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... house, and training quarters of Jack Johnson, the black champion prize fighter, is within walking distance of Reno. Its chicken dinners have helped to make the place famous. There are private rooms for those who seek seclusion, a splendid dance floor, and I am told that here the mechanical pianos grind out waltzes, one steps and fox trots, whilst glasses clink far into the night and ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... life as far as practicable, and rarely allowed himself to be seen. Having inherited the harem of his predecessors, together with their crown, he even went so far as to condemn his wives to a complete seclusion. He did not venture to hope, nor did those in his confidence, that the truth would not one day be known, but he hoped to gain, without loss of time, sufficient popularity to prevent the revelation of the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... his house would be little agreeable to his kinsman; and Mr. Forester conceived that this was a disqualification which would always augment in proportion as it was tolerated, and hoped that his society, by inducing Mr. Falkland to suspend his habits of seclusion, would be the means of essential benefit. Mr. Falkland opposed him no further. He would have been sorry to be thought unkind to a kinsman for whom he had a particular esteem; and the consciousness of not daring to assign the true reason, made him cautious of adhering ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... pain, it is difficult to suggest a condemnation that does not equally apply to the killing of animals for food or raiment. But the medical school laboratory seems to shrink from the public scrutiny. If there were no need for secrecy, is it likely that every attempt to penetrate the seclusion of the laboratory would be so strenuously opposed? OF WHAT IS THE LABORATORY AFRAID? If the present methods of demonstration or teaching of physiology are such as would meet general approval so far as their painlessness is concerned, why fear to make them known? ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... made her selfish. She has learned to take a deepening interest in the happiness of others; and thus, in her self-denying works of faith and labours of love, she finds the throbbings of her wounded spirit to beat less fiercely. She has gained all she hopes for in this life, peace—not in gloomy seclusion, but in holy activity—and she knows that there is joy for her laid up in that bright, eternal land where the sorrows of the past can cast no shadows ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... inexhaustible vivacity of his conversation and the minuteness of his knowledge, in everything which depended upon acuteness of observation and exactness of recollection. I remember, too, being somewhat startled, coming as I did from the seclusion of a country life, with a certain emphatic frankness in his manner, which, however, I came at last to like and to admire. The club met in the hotel called Washington Hall, the site of which, is now occupied by part of the circuit of ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... human existence. Wherever the religion of the New Testament can reach a man, over him it asserts its authority. No place so public, no spot so private, no situation so humble, no office so high, that Christianity will not rise to its eminence, descend to its depth, penetrate its seclusion, occupy its position, and still reiterate the same language,—speaking as one having authority, because it speaks in the name and in behalf of the Almighty. From the first has it advanced this claim ...
— The Religion of Politics • Ezra S. Gannett
... no virtue excludes another virtue. But abstinence excludes patience: for Gregory says (Pastor. iii, 19) that "impatience not unfrequently dislodges the abstainer's mind from its peaceful seclusion." Likewise he says (Pastor. iii, 19) that "sometimes the sin of pride pierces the thoughts of the abstainer," so that abstinence excludes humility. Therefore ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... had lived as a girl,—living in the very house which had once been her home. He had understood her going. It was the simple law of living things. The animal wounded beyond all thought of life seeks only a place of seclusion. ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... number was intended as a conveyance of all friendly greetings in season and out of season. As to its lesson, you need it almost as little as any man I know; for all your study and seclusion conduce to the general good, and disseminate truths that men cannot too earnestly take to heart. Yes, a capital story that of 'The Two Seaborn Babbies,' and wonderfully droll, I think. I may say ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... were studying divinity. The first perfect college was founded by Walter de Merton, the Chancellor of Henry III., to whom is due the conception of uniting the anti-monastic pursuit of secular learning with monastic seclusion and discipline, for the benefit of that multitude of young students who had hitherto dwelt at large in the city under little or no control, and often showed, by their faction fights and other outrages, that ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... patio, shaded by large mango-and mamonilla-trees, brightened by borders of flowering shrubs and plants, and filled with the fragrance of roses, geraniums, and pomegranate blossoms. The transition from the heat, filth, and sickening odors of the narrow street to the seclusion and shady coolness of this flower-scented patio was as delightful as it was sudden and unexpected. I could hardly have been more surprised if I had entered what I supposed to be a Siberian forwarding prison, and found myself in a conservatory of ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan
... earth; and it will not be, perhaps, till after many lives that the necessity for fresh births will be exhausted. But when we have attained perfection, the evil spell is broken; and 'then the wise man,' it is said, 'is extinguished as this lamp.' The highest life was one of seclusion and asceticism. The founder of Buddhism was met, during his first preaching, with the objection that his system, if carried out fully, would be the ruin and the extermination of humanity. And he did not deny the charge; but ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... spoke of the terrors of their captivity. They had been well treated, indeed; Monsieur de Bonnefon, or Diggle, as she afterward learned to call him, had visited them several times and seen that their wants were supplied. But their enforced seclusion and inactivity, their dread of the unknown, their uncertainty as to what might have befallen Mr. Merriman, had told heavily upon their health and spirits. Rumor brought news of the tragedy of the Black Hole: they heard ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... of the conclave which elected Cardinal Lambertini pope as Benedict XIV., gives a curious picture of the schemes and intrigues carried on in the mysterious seclusion of the conclave. Clement XII., of the Florentine Corsini family, had died. The cardinal Corsini, his nephew, was at the head of one faction in the conclave, and the cardinal Albani, nephew of Clement XI., who died in 1721, at the head of the other. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... year after the exhibition was made in Augusta, and at that time they heard that Robert Fulton had exhibited his steamboat "Clermont" on the Hudson River. They then gave up their design, and William Longstreet continued to remain in the seclusion that was so ...
— Stories Of Georgia - 1896 • Joel Chandler Harris
... thundered tumultuously in his breast, for he had never so touched her before. Her lashes rested modestly on her cheek—long, black, and upcurled a little at the ends. As her foot touched the ground, she raised them a moment, and looked at him with one swift flash of violet eyes made darker by the seclusion from which she had released them. Then in another moment she had dropped them again, detaching them from his with ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... was covered with black paper. This much, Pant discovered at once. The rest he left to the seclusion of his pup tent and the light ...
— Panther Eye • Roy J. Snell
... of great retirement and seclusion. Her work, the fruit of long solitude, bears the impress of a strong, reflective mind. It ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... green eyes! awful cats, that spit fire out o' their mouths, and claws that'll scratch yer to death;" imitating the clawing with their long dirty fingers quite in the face of poor Bunch, who immediately retired to the seclusion of her apron, and continued ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... A sweet seclusion, to forget The world and its disasters, And fill the mind with mignonette, Clove-pinks, and ...
— Fringilla: Some Tales In Verse • Richard Doddridge Blackmore
... isolation. In a time in which the worship of God preached by Judaism was rapidly spreading to all parts of the classical world, and the fundamental principles of the Jewish religion were steadily gaining appreciation and active adherence, this intense desire for seclusion may at first glance seem curious. But the phenomenon is perfectly simple. A foremost factor was national feeling, enhanced to a tremendous degree at the time of the destruction of Jerusalem. Lacking a political basis, it was transferred to religious ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... Hawke had studied skillfully out his gambit for an attack upon Hugh Johnstone's vanity. When he descended at the hospitable doors of his secret ally, Ram Lal Singh, he plunged into the seclusion of a luxurious easy toilet making. A dozen letters glanced over, a comforting hookah, and Alan Hawke had easily "sized up" the situation. For Ram Lal's first skeleton report had clearly proved to him that the coast was clear. "Thank Heavens there are as yet no rivals," ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... thus brought to a triumphant conclusion of good will. And the next morning, of course, is Boxing Day—a most appropriately named event. Even if fighting isn't strictly legal, backbiting unfortunately is. Still, the wise relation seeks the frequent seclusion of his own bedroom during that mostly inglorious day of Christmas aftermath. You see, there is no knowing what sparks may fly when the digestions of a devoted ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... tour. Somehow, they kept the scandal out of the papers. Well, he hiked out of Paris at the end of a week, just before the 14th. The police had asked the woman to leave town. He followed. Dope fiend, they say. The bride went into seclusion at once. She's never to be seen anywhere. The woman shot him through the head and then took a fine dose of poison. They tried to save her life, but couldn't. It was a ripping news ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... that in these tales the lady who rides forth is not naked; but to ride openly and unveiled would be thought almost as immodest in countries where strict seclusion is imposed upon women. All these tales include the Peeping Tom incident; and it appears, indeed, so obvious a corollary to the central thought of Lady Godiva's adventure that it is hardly likely to have required centuries for its evolution. From some traditions, however, it is absent. A story ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... whenever she felt poorly she had taken pains to put on a lively front, because she reasoned that menfolks hated squally weather. Now, with the passing of the andirons and all they stood for, it looked to her as if a door had shut on that pleasant seclusion where they two had communed together, and there would be no more laughter in the world. "Oliver!" she said, and stopped, because the ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... met in France he had guarded the secret carefully—often by an air of indifference which fitted him well, a relic of his years of seclusion, and a native awkwardness which was always more or less in evidence before women. Whatever his secret misgivings, he had blessed the opportunity which chance and her own wild will had thrown in his way. And now—she ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... misunderstand me, my brother," replied Du Bouchage, shaking his head, "or I should rather say your generous intelligence will not comprehend me. I do not wish for a cheerful residence or a delightful retreat, but a rigorously strict seclusion, as gloomy as the grave itself. I intend to pronounce my vows, vows which will leave me no other thought or occupation than a grave to dig ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas
... dead, I should gladly have pitted my strength and wit against the savage and primordial world in which I found myself. I could have lived in seclusion within some rocky cave until I had found the means to outfit myself with the crude weapons of the Stone Age, and then set out in search of her whose image had now become the constant companion of my waking hours, and the central and ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... withdrew to the country he had led a gay life in St. Petersburg, after resigning from the army, and in writing his fine peasant story, "Polikushka," setting up peasant-schools on his estate, and the like, he was merely paying his tribute to the spirit of the time (which reached him even in his seclusion), and imitating the innumerable village schools and Sunday schools in the capitals (for secular instruction of the laboring classes who were too busy for education during the week) in which the aristocratic and educated classes in general took a lively interest.[44] But ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... object of his real displeasure and her affected commiseration lived under a cloud, too proud to complain of her thraldom, but feeling it every second; mourning, in the seclusion of the trebly barred chambers of her heart, over her shattered idol and squandered affections, and fancying, in the morbid distrust engendered by the discovery of her lover's baseness, and the weight of her brother's unsparing reprobation of her insane imprudence, ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... Robert Jeckel, hearing that his beloved friend was now again to be found at Swarthmoor, dwelling there in much seclusion, seeking to regain the strength that had been sorely wasted in long and terrible imprisonments,—this man, Robert Jeckel, would no longer be persuaded or gainsaid, but set out at once with several others, who were like-minded and desirous to come as speedily as might ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... pretended God! He bade me follow his teachings, and I did, and I deceived him! Hal he thinks the game all at his fingers' ends. But I will neither marry Manuel, nor be a holy sister of Jose. There will come a time for me. Now I must work, keep him in the dark, spend the month in seclusion; by that time the troubles here will begin, and who may ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans
... Nicholas Crips visited other shops. The experts all told the same tale. The chamois bag held nothing but carbon counterfeits! The prospect of a life of ease and elegance faded away. It had been a vision, an illusion. Nickie's philosophy was not proof against this stroke. He felt broken, beaten. In the seclusion of his small room in a respectable suburban boarding-house, Nicholas wept and brooded. And now that the possibility of the splendid reward was gone, Nickie dwelt upon the fearful risk he had run more than he had done in all the long months ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson
... good to leave the Valley road and go into seclusion and shelter on the Forest trail; for a hurricane September wind was blowing, the kind of Western wind that the Eastern woman with a big hat thinks is possessed by ten thousand devils; the kind of wind that the Eastern office man with sensitive eyes curses with tears that are not grief; the ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... cloister's stillness and seclusion, By guardian angels led, Safe from temptation, safe from sin's pollution, She lives whom ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... the earlier sins of Spanish America. Upon a comparatively placid presidential regime followed a series of barrack uprisings or attacks by Congress on the executive. The constitution became a farce. No longer, to be sure, an abode of Arcadian seclusion as in colonial times, or a sort of territorial cobweb from the center of which a spiderlike Francia hung motionless or darted upon his hapless prey, or even a battle ground on which fanatical warriors ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... lattice window that looked into the churchyard, and was overshadowed by a yew-tree. His chair was surrounded by folios and quartos, piled upon the floor, and his table was covered with books and manuscripts. The cause of his seclusion was a work which he had recently received, and with which he had retired in rapture from the world, and shut himself up to enjoy a literary honeymoon undisturbed. Never did boarding-school girl devour the pages ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... Oriental literature. The air of Italy is better for me than the air of England, or I should never have left home. Pray accept the apologies of a student and an invalid. The active part of my life is at an end." The self-seclusion of his lordship seems to us to be explained in these brief lines. We have not, however, on that account spared our inquiries in other directions. Nothing to excite a suspicion of anything wrong has ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... has excluded many creatures, it has also saved many. Badgers, in all probability, would be extinct—really extinct, like the wolf—were it not for the seclusion of covers. Without the protection which hunting affords them, foxes would certainly have disappeared. The stag and fallow-deer are other examples; so, too, the wild white cattle maintained in a few parks. In a measure the rook owes its existence to protection; for although ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... and seclusion of this terrace have long invited the residence of persons of wealth and distinction. Many of those Frenchmen who, from interested connexions, or the prejudices of education, preferred exile and comparative poverty ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... 1846 that the Howitts made the acquaintance of Tennyson, whose poetry they had long admired. 'The retiring and meditative young poet, Alfred Tennyson, visited us,' relates Mary, 'and cheered our seclusion by the recitation of his exquisite poetry. He spent a Sunday night at our house, when we sat talking together till three in the morning. All the next day he remained with us in constant converse. We seemed to have known him for years. So in fact ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... these compartments Neeland stepped, hoping for seclusion, but backed out again, the place being full of artillery ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... a Count Piccolomini, a learned and agreeable man. He had a strange whim, however, of spending six months in the year in the strictest seclusion in his own house, never going out and never seeing any company; reading and working the whole time. He certainly did his best to make up for his hibernation during the other six months ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... appeared the most notable prose work in the native tongue since the time of Alfred, if we except the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Three young ladies who had secluded themselves from the world in Dorsetshire, wished rules for guidance in their seclusion. An unknown author, to oblige them, wrote the Ancren Riwle (Rule of Anchoresses). This book not only lays down rules for their future conduct in all the affairs of life, but ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... debility, and we must further remember that a Stoic of the age of Nero found himself in a most difficult position. He could not put his principles into full practice in public life without incurring the certain displeasure of the emperor. The stricter Stoic, therefore, like Thrasea, retired to the seclusion of his estates 'condemning the wicked world of Rome by his absence from it'.[151] Seneca, weaker, but possessed of greater common sense, chose the via media. He was content to sacrifice something of his principles to the service of Rome—and ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... extent than the main building, had been erected—not as wings and projections, but massed upon it on either side, changing its rigid square outlines to a vague parallelogram. While the patio retained the Spanish conception of al fresco seclusion, a vast colonnade of veranda on the southern side was a concession to American taste, and its breadth gave that depth of shadow to the inner rooms which had been lost in the thinner shell of the new ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte
... it was not to compare it with that which now possessed her; the only point of comparison was the sense of lightness, of emancipation, which she remembered feeling, in the whirl of a waltz or the seclusion of a conservatory, during the brief course of her youthful romance. She had not known again till today that lightness, that glow of freedom; but now it was something more than a blind groping of the blood. The peculiar charm of her feeling for Selden was that she understood ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... now they are studying Christ's relation to human life. People used to read the Bible to find out what it said of Heaven; now they read it more to find what light it throws upon the pathway of to-day. In former years many thought to prepare themselves for future bliss by a life of seclusion here; we are learning that to follow in the footsteps of the Master we must go about doing good. Christ declared that He came that we might have life and have it more abundantly. The world is learning that Christ came not ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... it out, holding his head back as he marched, so that the smoke of the cigarette between his lips should not obscure his eyes. Rachel followed with some oddments. Behold those two away together in the seclusion of the kitchen; and Mrs. Maldon and ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... notion that his complaint was other than bodily. The ill-looking birds that gathered to the house, the strange noises that sounded from the drawing-room in the dead hours of night, the careless attendance and intemperate habits of the nurse, the entire absence of correspondence, the entire seclusion of Mr. Jones himself, whose face, up to that hour, he could not have sworn to in a court of justice—all weighed unpleasantly upon the young man's mind. A sense of something evil, irregular and underhand, haunted and depressed him; and this uneasy ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... persons, Tennyson was a remote and romantic figure. His homes in the Isle of Wight and at Aldworth had a dignified seclusion about them which was very appropriate to so great a poet, and invested him with a certain awe through which the multitude rarely penetrated. As a matter of fact, however, he was an excellent companion, a ready talker, and gifted with so much wit that it is ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... The professor now told me that long ago in France, for a few short, blissful years, he had been the husband of the sweetest of women. She had left behind a daughter, the sole companion of his life and the apple of his eye. She lived in complete seclusion, rarely even leaving the house. He did not desire her to make acquaintances in this country, nor indeed was she able to speak a word of any language but her own. There was no question of my making her acquaintance in the ordinary sense, or even of meeting her a second time, but if I desired to testify ...
— A Positive Romance - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... mystery to his companions in the little London orchestra in which he played, and he kept his daughter, Anna, in such severe seclusion that they little more than knew that she existed and was beautiful. Not far from Soho Square, they lived, in that sort of British lodgings in which room-rental carries with it the privilege of using one hole ...
— The Old Flute-Player - A Romance of To-day • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... desired, when old age should have rendered him incapable of his priestly charge, to be allowed to retire from active work, and end his days in the quiet seclusion of his native district—a strath shut in by hills, many miles to the north of Ardmuirland. But the family from which the priest had sprung were no great favorites there, and his wish, when made known, had not been cordially received by the people. This had been sufficient to excite the wrath of ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett
... 缺適秦。【三節】鼓方叔、 but their words corresponded with reason, and their actions were such as men are anxious to see. This is all that is to be remarked in them. 4. 'It may be said of Yu-chung and I-yi, that, while they hid themselves in their seclusion, they gave a license to their words; but, in their persons, they succeeded in preserving their purity, and, in their retirement, they acted according to the exigency of the times. 5. 'I am different from all these. I have no ...
— The Chinese Classics—Volume 1: Confucian Analects • James Legge
... You must have some reason for this intended seclusion. Last year I fancied you wished much to accompany us, and I ever regretted your delicate health prevented it. What has made you change your mind so completely? Have you any distaste for the society ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... the disposition and habits of Mrs. Lincoln. She is no longer the sprightly body she was when her very presence illumed the White House with gayety. Now she is sad and sedate, seeking seclusion, and maintaining communication merely with her most intimate personal friends. The most of her time she devotes to instructive reading within the walls of her boudoir. Laying her book aside spasmodically, she places her hand upon her forehead, as if ruminating upon something ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley
... soldier, then in the full bloom of youth, who, unconsoled by fame, had nursed the memory of some hidden sorrow amidst the pine-trees that cast their shadow over the sunny Italian lake; how Riccabocca, then honoured and happy, had courted from his seclusion the English signore, then the mourner and the voluntary exile; how they had grown friends amidst the landscapes in which her eyes had opened to the day; how Harley had vainly warned him from the rash schemes in which he had sought ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton |
