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Cloistered   Listen
adjective
Cloistered  adj.  
1.
Dwelling in cloisters; solitary. "Cloistered friars and vestal nuns." "In cloistered state let selfish sages dwell, Proud that their heart is narrow as their cell."
2.
Furnished with cloisters.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Cloistered" Quotes from Famous Books



... down into the cloistered shadows of the valley her spirits descended too and when she slipped through the thickets and reached a certain point, something like despair tightened about her heart. Across the line of her march boiled a freshet ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck

... the platform was an imposing array of intellect, courage, and noble character. First there was dear, revered Lucretia Mott, her sweet, saintly face cloistered in her Quaker bonnet, her serene and gracious presence, so dignified yet so utterly unpretending, so self-poised yet so gentle, so peaceful yet so powerful, sanctioning and sanctifying the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... man, "that I have been known by that name. But I am in reality, and always have been, in reality, something far more lowly than a churchwarden; I am, and always have been, at heart, a meek and humble follower of the holy Thomas a Kempis, whose life of serene and cloistered sanctity I have always wished to imitate. Now that I am myself, it is my ambition to be known, if it is not too presumptuous to say so, as ...
— The Old Tobacco Shop - A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure • William Bowen

... over an undulating plain sparsely dotted with hamlets and clouded here and there with olive-orchards—brings one, with a sufficient appreciation of good cheer, and clean, cool rooms, shade, and quiet, into the cloistered court of Hagia Triada, a semi-military building of the Venetian days. Still unfinished, the Turkish conquest having interrupted its progress, with all other in the seventeenth century. In the centre of the quadrangle, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various

... high-minded, wrote with distinction in prose and verse. Loyal to France and a champion of her sex, there was nothing she more fervently desired than to see the French prosperous and their ladies honoured. In her old age she was cloistered in the Abbey of Poissy, where her daughter was a nun. There, on the 31st of July, 1429, she completed a poem of sixty-one stanzas, each containing eight lines of eight syllables, in praise of the Maid. In halting ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France

... curled not Tweed alone, that breeze— For far upon Northumbrian seas It freshly blew, and strong; Where from high Whitby's cloistered pile, Bound to St. Cuthbert's holy isle, It bore a bark along. Upon the gale she stooped her side, And bounded o'er the swelling tide As she were dancing home. The merry seamen laughed to see Their gallant ship so lustily Furrow the green ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin

... stunner, dad, and then a trifle. But I regret to say that she is too fresh from the cloistered halls of learning. You see I have been out of college three years and have managed to forget such a jolly lot that I really couldn't talk to her. She'd want me to make love in Latin and correspond in Greek. Worse than that, she understands ...
— Officer 666 • Barton W. Currie

... the world, without having found suitable opportunity for getting rid of their golden dolphin. Thereupon a eulogy of the marvellous fish, with a thousand delicate allusions to the young betrothed of Marguerite of Flanders, then sadly cloistered in at Amboise, and without a suspicion that Labor and Clergy, Nobility and Merchandise had just made the circuit of the world in his behalf. The said dauphin was then young, was handsome, was stout, and, above all (magnificent origin of all royal ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo

... of Gottesthal was a nun of surpassing loveliness, whose beauty had aroused the wild passion of a certain noble. Undeterred by the fact of the lady being a cloistered nun, he found a way of communicating his passion to her, and at last met her face to face, despite bars and bolts. Eloquently he pleaded his love, swearing to free her from her bonds, to devote his life to her if only she would listen to his entreaties. He ended his asseverations by ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence

... being fine, I proceeded to call on Mme. de St. Cyr. She received me in her boudoir, and on my way thither I could not but observe the perfect quiet and cloistered seclusion that pervaded the whole house,—the house itself seeming only an adjunct of the still and sunny garden, of which one caught a glimpse through the long open hall-windows beyond. This boudoir did not differ from others to which I have been admitted: the same delicate shades; all the dainty ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various

... in their lives, were the brothers separated; for though Gaston had no thought but of speedy return when he set out on his journey, they saw him no more in that quiet cloistered home, and for two long years the brothers did not meet again. Truth to tell, the quiet of a religious retreat had no charm for Gaston, as it had for his brother, and the stirring doings in the great world held him altogether ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green

... properly be denominated the adoptive, than the natural son of God [m]. This heresy was condemned in the council of Francfort, held in 794, and consisting of 300 bishops. Such were the questions which were agitated in that age, and which employed the attention not only of cloistered scholars, but of the wisest and greatest princes [n]. [FN [l] Chron. Sax. p. 65 [m] Dupin, cent. 8. chap. 4. [n] Offa, in order to protect his country from Wales; drew a rampart or ditch of a hundred miles in length, from Basinwerke ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume

... have I?—Oh lady dear! Do I then sigh in vain for thee; And wilt thou, ever thus severe, Be as a cloistered nun to me? Methinks this heart but ill can bear An unrewarded slave ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello

... fine green sward outside the entrance to the south, in a kind of large court, enclosed by a high cloistered wall, in which all our attendants and followers found shelter. Colonel and Mrs. King, and some other gentlemen, were encamped in the same place, and for the same purpose; and we had a very agreeable ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman

... so soon forgotten. Here, the imperishable part of noble minds survives, placid and equal, when strongholds of assault and defence are overthrown; when the tyranny of the many, or the few, or both, is but a tale; when Pride and Power are so much cloistered dust. The fire within the stern streets, and among the massive Palaces and Towers, kindled by rays from Heaven, is still burning brightly, when the flickering of war is extinguished and the household fires of generations have ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens

... I was content with the simple rural poverty of my own; hence this sweetness; my work never reminds you of that;—is pure of that.' And nature advertises me in such persons that in democratic America she will not be democratized. How cloistered and constitutionally sequestered from the market and from scandal! It was only this morning that I sent away some wild flowers of these wood-gods. They are a relief from literature,—these fresh draughts from the sources of thought and sentiment; as we read, in an age of polish ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... doesn't get me. I'm pretty well cloistered, and I suppose books mean more than people ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... of Oxford had changed in Albinia's eyes since the days of her brother. Alma Mater had been a vision of pealing bells, chanting voices, cloistered shades, bright waters—the source of her most cherished thoughts, the abode of youth walking in the old paths of pleasantness and peace; and she knew that to faithful hearts, old Oxford was still the same. But to her present anxious gaze it had become a field of snares and temptations, whither ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge

... hothouse, seeking the oak on the storm-swept hills. In that beautiful story of the lost paradise, God pulls down the hedge built around Adam and Eve. The government through a fence outside was succeeded by self-government inside. The hermit and the cloistered saint end their career with innocence. But Christ, struggling unto blood against sin, ends His career with character. God educates man by giving him complete charge over himself and setting him on "the barebacked ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis

... because we hear so very little about them. The modern world has no existence for him whatever; and yet one cannot say that he lives in the Middle Ages, because he knows so little about them; he moves in a paradise of cloistered virgins and mild saints; and the virtue that he chiefly extols is the virtue of faith; the more that reason revolts at a statement, the greater is the triumph of godly faith involved in ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson

... owned a sapphire ring made by St. Dunstan. Dunstan was an industrious art spirit, being reported by William of Malmsbury as "taking great delight in music, painting, and engraving." In the "Ancren Riwle," a book of directions for the cloistered life of women, nuns are forbidden to wear "ne ring ne brooche," and to deny themselves other ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison

... friar of the Recollect order, an offshoot of the Franciscans. Mr. Thwaites, who has edited Hennepin's "New Discovery of a Vast Country," from which the account of Niagara Falls here given is taken, describes him as "an uneasy soul, uncontent to remain cloistered and fretting to engage in travel and wild adventure." After the pioneer voyage down the Mississippi, made by Joliet and Marquette, had become known in Europe, it intensified an already active spirit of discovery. In the summer of 1678 Hennepin joined La Salle and Laval Montmorency ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Volume I. - Voyages Of Discovery And Early Explorations: 1000 A.D.-1682 • Various

... Let us examine this desire, And, first of all, we must free our minds from mere literalism. If we do not, we shall find in this desire many things that are not in it, and miss everything that is in it. This is not the longing for a cloistered life, the confession of one who is weary of this heavy world, doubtful of its promises and afraid of its powers. 'The house of the Lord' is not a place, but a state, not an edifice, but an attitude. It is a fair and unseen dwelling-place builded by the hands of God to be the home, ...
— The Threshold Grace • Percy C. Ainsworth

... fast it falls. How they crowd round the palace gate to-night. Stay the horses, Ivan, I will speak... Do not fear, my friends, your lives are safe. I promise it... What is this? My rooms? How lonely they seem to-night. 'Alone?' Yes, I am always alone. No lover's step has ever echoed through this cloistered silence. Alone and sad. Ah! how I have suffered here... What do they say? It will be over soon, it will be over—soon. One more battle to win. Let me summon all my courage now. I have faced ordeals before. I have forgotten ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)

... communication. Openings into the being they may be, but the closed cheek is more communicative. From them the blood of Perdita never did look out. It ebbed and flowed in her face, her dance, her talk. It was hiding in her paleness, and cloistered in her reserve, but visible in prison. It leapt and looked, at a word. It was conscious in the fingers that reached out flowers. It ran with her. It was silenced when she hushed her answers to the king. Everywhere it was close behind the ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell

... belief to the fact. The old, cloistered life at Brockhurst, for good or evil, was broken up. Katherine Calmady recognised that another stage had been reached on the relentless journey, that new prospects opened, new horizons invited her anxious gaze. She recognised also that all which had been was dead, according to its existing form, ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet

... that the teapot was grimy and the fryingpan black with soot! It was all part of the wonderful new vista that had suddenly opened before her gaze. She had awakened into life and already she was dimly realizing that many and varied experiences lay waiting for her in that untrodden path beyond her cloistered world. ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine

... summer noon, beseech thee follow me Into the dim, dream-haunted secrecy The cool, green glooms, the grottoed deep retreat, Of yon old wood; down aisles of lichened trees— Grey Merlins clasped by lissom Viviens Of clinging vine—to cloistered sylvan glens, Where Nature ...
— The Path of Dreams - Poems • Leigh Gordon Giltner

... conditions of what we have been accustomed to consider the modern world then began for women. They were no longer cloistered—whether in convents or the home—but neither were they any longer worshipped. They began to be treated as human beings, and when men idealized them in figures of romantic charm or pathos—figures like Shakespeare's ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis

... that is most worth seeing in Pnom-Penh is cloistered within the mysterious walls of vivid pink which surround the Royal Palace. Here is the residence of His Majesty Prea Bat Samdach Prea Sisowath, King of Cambodia; here dwell the twelve score dancing-girls of the famous royal ballet and the hundreds of concubines and attendants ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell

... vague dreams of renunciation. She saw herself cloistered in some quiet spot, withdrawn from the world; a place where there were long vistas of pillars and Gothic arches, after a photograph in the living room at home, and a ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... time she remained plunged in a delightful trance, till the solemn knell of a neighbouring convent, summoning the cloistered monks to their orisons, suddenly dissolved the potent charm, and banished the bright illusion for the reality of sorrow. The dear image of her lover had departed, and a veil of gloom seemed to fall over the surrounding scene. An unearthly dullness ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio

... dost know me? rang o'er the heather wild, While the dew-drop lifted its golden head, and the hoary bull-frog smiled; Yet every eye was dim with tears, as the shadow of Time replied, And the echo from over the moorland drear, In cloistered glory and voice of cheer, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., Issue 31, October 29, 1870 • Various

... amorous course To cloistered sweet in thickets found; The leaves obey its tender force, And stir ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year • Various

... praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat."[20] Down to "virtue," the current S and R are both announced and repeated unobtrusively, and by way of a ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... The hedge which had once divided the neighbouring domains was broken down in many places, and Paul and his brother played often on the timber-stacks, and in the aromatic groves of sawn planks which inclined towards each other in row on row, making an odorous cloistered shade, excellent for enacted memories of Chingachgook and Uncas and the Pathfinder. There was a sawpit in the yard, a favourite hiding-place for the boys, and the turpentiny scent of fresh sawdust had always ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray

... the memory of that cloistered freedom, of that independence, wide as desire, though, perhaps, only ten feet by twelve! How much of future tastes and powers lay in embryo there in that small chamber! It is the egg of the coming life. There the young sailor pores over the ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell

... descended again towards the shore. On the one side lay the Cumbra Islands, and Bute, dear to departed royalty. Afar beyond them, in the hoary magnificence of nature, rise the mountains of Argyllshire; the cairns, as my brother says, of a former world. On the other side of the road, we saw the cloistered ruins of the religious house of Southenan, a nunnery in those days of romantic adventure, when to live was to enjoy a poetical element. In such a sweet sequestered retreat, how much more pleasing to the soul it would have been, for ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt

... her father spake: "Say to the King, The child is sought by princes far and near; If thy most gentle son can bend the bow, Sway sword, and back a horse better than they, Best would he be in all and best to us But how shall this be, with his cloistered ways?" Then the King's heart was sore, for now the Prince Begged sweet Yasodhara for wife—in vain, With Devadatta foremost at the bow, Ardjuna master of all fiery steeds, And Nanda chief in sword-play; but ...
— The Light of Asia • Sir Edwin Arnold

... the young officer who was its skipper must have been much the same as those of a man acting as his own chauffeur and having a breakdown on a holiday in a section of town where the population was as dense as it was curious in the early days of motoring. For months he had been living a cloistered life to keep his friends from knowing what he was doing, as he worked to master the eccentricities of his untried steed, his life and the lives of his crew depending upon this mastery. Now he had stepped from behind the curtain of military secrecy into the ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer

... warning me, in a fatherly manner, that a rheumatic fever would try my philosophy (as indeed it would), and that my gospel would not do for 'those who are shut out from the exercise of any manly virtue save renunciation.' To those who know that rickety and cloistered spectre, the real R. L. S., the paper, besides being clever in itself, presents rare elements of sport. The critical parts are in particular very bright and neat, and often excellently true. Get it by all manner ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson

... particularly conversational, and was apt to repeat the same things over and over again, with a sublime unconsciousness of being prosy; but he liked to hear Mary talk, and he listened with seeming intelligence. He questioned her about the world outside his cloistered life—the wars and rumours of wars—and, although the names of the questions and the men of the day seemed utterly strange to him, and he had to have them repeated to him again and again, he seemed to take an intelligent ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon

... produced by the commencing notes of each strain, which are sudden and on a high key; the second, by the graceful chromatic slide to the termination, which is inimitable and exceedingly solemn. I have sometimes thought that a part of the delightful influence of these notes might be attributable to the cloistered situations from which they were delivered. But I have occasionally heard them while the bird was singing from a tree in an open field, when they were equally pleasing and impressive. I am not peculiar in my admiration of this little songster. I have observed ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various

... a cloistered and court-built house will know the convenient and comfortable feature we would here point out:—it is especially suited to the climate of England, and to the domestic habits of English families; it is one of the most ornamental features a house can possess; it gives great ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various

... Arcade. He often lunched at the Berkeley and frequently dined at Willis's. Also he had laughed at the antics of Arthur Roberts, and gazed through a pair of gold-mounted opera-glasses at Empire ballets and at the discreet juggleries of Paul Cinquevalli. The romance of cloistered saintliness was not his. If it had been he might never have rebelled. For how often it is romance which makes a home for religion in the heart of man, romance which feathers the nest of purity in which the hermit soul delights to dwell! Is it not that bizarre silence ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens

... cloistered openings; sunny little meadows inclining to a spring, where the wild pea-vine, plant beloved of horses, and infallible sign of a rich soil, grew knee-deep. Such an opening they learned, however small, was quaintly dignified by the natives with ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner

... region, so far as south and central Italy are concerned. I was there in the golden hour after sunset, and yet again in the twilight of dew-drenched morning; and it seemed to me that in this temple not made by hands there dwelt an enchantment more elemental, and more holy, than in the cloistered aisles hard by. This assemblage of solemn trees has survived, thanks to rare conditions of soil and climate. The land lies high; the ground is perennially moist and intersected by a horde of rills that join their waters to form ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas

... there a lovely cloistered court he found, A fountain in the midst o'erthrown and dry, And in the cloister briers twining round The slender shafts; the wondrous imagery Outworn by more than many years gone by, Because the country people, in their fear Of ...
— The Earthly Paradise - A Poem • William Morris

... There is a primary "virtue which cannot be taught." No man can learn from another the meaning of human activity or the possibilities of human emotion. But this [Greek: pou sto] being given, even the cloistered student may find that, as his soul passes into the strife of social forces and the complication of individual experience, which the newspaper and the novel severally represent, his sympathies break from the ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green

... when she pleased; Was now convinced he acted wrong, To hide her from the world so long, And in dull studies to engage One of her tender sex and age. That every nymph with envy owned, How she might shine in the Grande-Monde, And every shepherd was undone, To see her cloistered like a nun. This was a visionary scheme, He waked, and found it but a dream; A project far above his skill, For Nature must be Nature still. If she was bolder than became A scholar to a courtly dame, She might excuse a man of letters; Thus tutors often treat their betters, And since his ...
— The Battle of the Books - and Other Short Pieces • Jonathan Swift

... went to his seat in the garden. But it was with another look that he watched the sea; and presently the sail moved across the blue triangle, and soon it had rounded the headland. Gaston's first coming was in the padre's mind; and as the vespers bell began to ring in the cloistered silence, a fragment of Auber's plaintive tune passed like ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister

... saint, and it is easy to be a man of the world; the difficulty is to combine the two qualities, the cunning of the serpent with the innocence of the dove. There is nothing of the naive and guileless innocence of a cloistered virtue in the book, but though the serpent is very cunning his wiliness and craftiness coexist with a simple enthusiasm of humanity which is very marvellous to behold. When we read General Booth's expressions of confidence in the salvability of mankind ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker

... Bethlehem, wherein a score of gaily dressed figures of painted wood represent the Holy Family and the worshipping peasants. Little in fact has been changed within the building itself, and the exquisite cloistered court with its slender intertwining Saracenic columns still remains to delight alike the artist and the antiquary. We say "still remains" advisedly; for beyond the tiny quadrangle our eyes at once light upon a scene of ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan

... said of Buddhist monks is also said of Mt Athos and similar Christian establishments. I am far from saying that this depreciation of the cloistered life is just in either case but any impartial critic of monastic institutions must admit that their virtues avoid publicity and their faults attract attention. In all countries a large percentage of ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot

... honest leaf green (chlorophyll), we know that plants as low in the scale as fungi often take on the most brilliant of yellows and reds. In the painted cup the bracts, which enfold the insignificant yellowish cloistered flowers like a cape, render them great service in attracting the ruby-throated hummingbird by donning his favorite color. No lip landing place is provided for insects, as in other members of the figwort family dependent on bees; although bumblebees, which ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan

... incarnation of economy. She must be chaste as proud Diana was, Yet warm as Venus. To all others cold As some white glacier glittering in the sun; To me as ardent as the sensuous rose That yields its sweetness to the burrowing bee All ignorant of evil in the world, And innocent as any cloistered nun, Yet wise as Phryne in the arts of love When I come thirsting to her nectared lips. Good as the best, and tempting as the worst, A saint, a siren, and ...
— Poems of Power • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... will fancy yourself transported into the city of a fairy tale. The grass grows rank among the broad flagstones, and in the morning twilight thousands of tame pigeons flutter around the solitary lofty tower. On three sides you find yourself surrounded by cloistered walks. In these the silent Turk sits smoking his long pipe, the handsome Greek leans against the pillar and gazes at the upraised trophies and lofty masts, memorials of power that is gone. The flags hang down like mourning scarves. A girl ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen

... this childhood, in the almost cloistered seclusion of the Fichtelgebirge, with Goethe's at cosmopolitan Frankfurt or even with Schiller's at Marbach. Much that came unsought, even to Schiller, Richter had a struggle to come by; much he could never get at all. The place of "Frau Aja" in the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... grief, that I wonder at the patience exercised by her during this irksome visit. Then there was some reading of that book whose claims are always felt in the terrible days of affliction. After that we had a walk in the yew garden, that quaint little cloistered quadrangle—the most solemn, sad, and ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu

... remained very angry and discontented. After her neglected and oppressed younger days, the courtesy and admiration she had received for the last ten days had the effect of making her like a spoilt child; and when they entered the inner cloistered court within, and were met by the Lady Prioress, at the head of all her sisters in black dresses, she hardly vouchsafed an inclination of the head in reply to the graceful and courtly welcome with which the princesses, nieces ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge

... bid, for cloistered cell, Our neighbor and our work farewell, Nor strive to wind ourselves too high For sinful man beneath ...
— Hymns for Christian Devotion - Especially Adapted to the Universalist Denomination • J.G. Adams

... and the martyrdom of Josefina. The last pages of The Grandee are, indeed, tinged with almost intolerable gloom, and in a society comparatively so civilised as our own, the revenge of the unnatural mother may seem almost overdrawn. The author contends, however, that in the cryptic and cloistered provincial life which he describes, where the light of censure can hardly reach a powerful criminal, such wickedness as is perpetrated upon Josefina is neither improbable nor unprecedented. Nor do the reports of Mr. Benjamin Waugh permit us to question that such horrors ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds

... am anxious to know the impressions of a person of your age and antecedents. You might collect them for me, will you? Not now. One day when you are in the mood. Somewhat terrestrial and palpitating, is it not, after the cloistered twilight of ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas

... to make, was effectually nipped in the bud by the entrance of the scout, who came in to announce Mr. and Miss Oswald and Mrs. Martindale. Edie wore the grey dress, her brother's present, and flitted into the room after her joyous fashion, full of her first fresh delight at the cloistered quad ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen

... never intended for more than temporary premises; and for ten years there had been talk of new buildings, at first on the spot, then on the Guild's ground at Bewdley, where, at one time, Ruskin planned a fairy palace in the woods, with cloistered hostelries for the wandering student. Such schemes were stopped less by his illness ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood

... of brooding quiet, like the ocean just before the arrival of a cyclone. As Lucille had said, Miss Huskisson's voice was loud. It was a powerful organ, and there was no doubt that it would take the cloistered stillness of the Cosmopolis dining-room and stand it on one ear. Almost unconsciously, Archie found himself bracing his muscles and holding his breath as he had done in France at the approach of the zero hour, when awaiting the first roar of a barrage. ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse

... Missions were built in the form of a hollow square: the church representing the fachada, with the priests' quarters and the houses for the Indians forming the wings. These quarters were generally colonnaded or cloistered, with a series of semicircular arches, and roofed with red tiles. In the interior was the patio or court, which often contained a fountain and a garden. Upon this patio opened all the apartments: those of the fathers and of the majordomo, ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James

... no genius rare, Transfiguring in fire or wave or air At will, but a poor gnome that, cloistered up In some rock-chamber, with his agate-cup, His topaz-rod, his seed-pearl, in these few And their arrangement finds enough to ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford

... marble couch was reared A monumental shrine, Where cloistered sisters gathering round, Made night and morn the aisle resound ...
— Successful Recitations • Various

... in the subtle thing That's spirit: tho' cloistered fast, soar free; Account as wood, brick, stone, this ring Of the rueful neighbours, and—forth ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning

... there is of history; there may be scientific methods of dealing with it and certain economic laws, subject to many exceptions, which we may consider to be established, but nevertheless it is as far from being an exact science as one can conceive. The exact science notion is the misconception of cloistered learning which can build impregnable systems where there are none to attack them, but which has no idea of the practical difficulties of an unsympathetic world where the precious system must meet every possible objection ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various

... fragments with which the soil was covered having been, i suppose, a quarry of material. There are no streets; the small, shabby houses, almost hovels, straggle at random over the uneven ground. The only important feature is a convent of cloistered nuns, who have a large garden (always within the walls) behind their house, and whose doleful establishment you look down into, or down at simply, from the battlements of the citadel. One or two of the ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James

... question in its metaphysical acceptation. He had the sense of a powerful but undirected intelligence working from the simple premisses of experience; of a cloistered mind that had functioned profoundly; a mind unbound by the tradition of all the speculations and discoveries of man, the essential conclusions of which were contained in that library ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford

... Visitation." Her family was bitterly opposed to the step, more especially her mother, whose indignation was so pronounced that she never to the day of her death forgave the Church for depriving her of her daughter's companionship. General Scott, however, frequently visited her in her cloistered home, and always manifested much consideration for the Convent as well as for the nuns, the daily companions of his daughter. Although she possessed a proud and imperious nature, combined with great personal beauty and ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur

... religious recluses deceived by self- righteousness, and men of affairs devoutly faithful to sober duty. Catherine enters into every consciousness. As a rule we associate with very pure and spiritual women, even if not cloistered, a certain deficient sense of reality. We cherish them, and shield them from harsh contact with the world, lest the fine flower of their delicacy be withered. But no one seems to have felt in this way about Catherine. Her "love ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa

... veteran, Sir Charles Napier, made a point of cutting Sir Jasper Nicolls; curtsied to the little Princess Victoria, then staying at the York Hotel, and turned discreetly aside when the Duchess de Berri happened to pass; and (since they were not entirely cloistered) attended, under the watchful eye of a governess, "select" concerts in the Assembly Rooms (with Catalini and Garsia in the programmes) and an occasional play at the Theatre Royal, where from time to time they had a glimpse of Fanny Kemble and Kean and Macready; and, in short, followed ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham

... saw it open for her like a cloistered aisle between cold pillars. He offered her, not the emotional variations, intolerable to her weariness just then, of a new devotion; but green shaded rooms, and the beauty of old things, and a little old-fashioned gentleman's courtesy.... So, ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors

... St. Mary Abbots, with its high spire, forms a very striking object on the north side of the road. There is a stone porch over the entrance to the churchyard, and a picturesque cloistered passage leading round the south side. Within the cloister is a tablet commemorating the fact that it was partly built by Rev. E. C. Glyn and his wife in memory of his mother, who died in 1892. A little further on, immediately facing the south door, is another ...
— The Kensington District - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton

... guardian of the holy light that burned beneath the oak-trees of Kildare! Over all Ireland and through the Hebridean Isles, she is renowned above any other. We think of her, moreover, not alone, but as the centre of a great company of cloistered maidens, the refuge and helper of the sinful and sorrowful, who found in the gospel that Patrick preached a message of consolation and deliverance. Let it be remembered that the shroud of Patrick is deemed to have been woven by Brigid's hand; that when she died, in 525, Columcille, ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox

... advertized, may perhaps some day be taken up by a syndicate and pushed upon the public as The Times pushed the Encyclopaedia Britannica; but until then it will certainly not prevail against Pitman. I have bought three copies of it during my lifetime; and I am informed by the publishers that its cloistered existence is still a steady and healthy one. I actually learned the system two several times; and yet the shorthand in which I am writing these lines is Pitman's. And the reason is, that my secretary cannot transcribe Sweet, having been perforce taught ...
— Pygmalion • George Bernard Shaw

... beginnings and short lives our colleges have gathered neither that momentum of years heavy with mighty names and weighty memories, nor of wealth heaping massive piles and drawing within their cloistered walls the learning of successive centuries which carries the European universities crashing down the ages, though often heavy laden with the dead forms of mediaeval preciseness. No established church makes with them common cause, no favoring and influential aristocracy gives them the careless ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... cut her to the heart. Still, her love for him was so intense that she obeyed his order. Soon after she took the vows; and in the convent chapel, shaken with sobs, she knelt before the altar and assumed the veil of a cloistered nun. Abelard himself put on the black tunic of a Benedictine monk and entered the Abbey of ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr

... plan of education for his daughter, to the end that she might become happy, good, upright and gentle. She had lived at home until the age of twelve, when, despite the tears of her mother, she was placed in the Convent of the Sacred Heart. He had kept her severely secluded, cloistered, in ignorance of the secrets of life. He wished the Sisters to restore her to him pure at seventeen years of age, so that he might imbue her mind with a sort of rational poetry, and by means of the fields, in the midst ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant

... soft and changeful colour, transfusing all visible things into the misty semblance of some divine dwelling of dreams. Ding-dong—ding dong! The last echo of the last bell died away upon the air—the last words enunciated by devout priests in their cloistered seclusion were said—"In hora mortis nostrae! Amen!"—the market women went on their slow way homeward,—the children scampered off in different directions, easily forgetful of the Old-World petition they had thought of, yet left unuttered,—the bargeman ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli

... eve descending Throw o'er cloistered courts their gloom, Dimly with the twilight blending Memories long forgotten loom. From the bright fire's falling embers Faces smile that smiled of yore; Till my heart again remembers Hopes and thoughts that live ...
— Sagittulae, Random Verses • E. W. Bowling

... face is veiling like a cloistered nun at vespers; As towards the alter candles of the night a censer swings, And the echo of tradition wakes from slumbering and whispers, Where the Capilano river ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson

... him from the rare effects. Ah! They little know! He can take the wistfulness of children, and the quaint gestures of dead Comedians, and the fantasies of old worm-eated folios, and the shadows of sundials upon cloistered lawns, and the heartbreaking evasions of such as "can never know love" and out of these things he can make a music as piteous and lovely as Ophelia's songs. It is a curious indication of the lack of real poetic feeling ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys

... of the quadrangle; and four gates fronting the same cardinal points, conduct from the top of each staircase into the body of the building, or into the great court. The great entrance, through a pilastered gateway, fronts the east, and descends by a second flight of steps into the cloistered court. On the various pilasters of the upper terrace are the metopes, with singular sculptures. On descending the second staircase into the cloistered court, on one side, appears the triple pyramidal tower, which ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)

... Translated to her soul the great world's voice, And the world-spirit made her heart rejoice. And love was hers,—perennial, intense,— The love that wells from joy and innocence And sanctifies the cloistered heart of youth,— The love of love, of beauty, ...
— Gawayne And The Green Knight - A Fairy Tale • Charlton Miner Lewis

... women who, of their own will, give up the freedom of the world to enter a convent after they have tasted life! Oh, I would rather be the poorest, the ugliest peasant hag, toiling for daily bread, than one of these cold cloistered souls, so that the free air of heaven, be it with the winds or the rain, might beat upon me, so that I might live and love as I like, do right as I like; ay, and do wrong if I liked, with the free ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle

... the lone screech-owl's note, who builds his bower Amid the mouldering caverns dark and damp, Or the calm breeze that rustles in the leaves Of flaunting ivy, that with mantle green Invests some wasted tower. Or let me tread Its neighbouring walk of pines, where mused of old The cloistered brothers: through the gloomy void That far extends beneath their ample arch As on I pace, religious horror wraps My soul in dread repose. But when the world Is clad in midnight's raven-coloured robe, 'Mid hollow ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum

... constant meditation upon "antiphoners, grailes, and psalters,"[212] towards subjects of a more generally interesting nature. I am willing to admit every degree of merit to the manual dexterity of the cloistered student. I admire his snow-white vellum missals, emblazoned with gold, and sparkling with carmine and ultramarine blue. By the help of the microscopic glass, I peruse his diminutive penmanship, executed with the most astonishing neatness and regularity; and often ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... meaning in everything—the broad street, the crowd of moving figures and carriages, the houses looking down upon it—seized upon me with a rush. "Yes, it is good—the mere living!" Joy in the infinite variety of the great city as compared with the "cloistered virtue" of Oxford; the sheer pleasure of novelty, of the kind new faces, and the social discoveries one felt opening on many sides; the delight of new perceptions, new powers in oneself—all this seemed to flower for me in those few minutes of reverie—if one can apply such a word to an experience ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... the centre of the village, surrounded by a high, redbrick wall enclosing a garden. Another was a big, low, graceful building with wings. It had once been a monastery. It was covered with ivy, which grew thick and hungry upon it, and it was called the Cloistered House. The last of the three was of wood, and of no great size—a severely plain but dignified structure, looking like some council-hall of a past era. Its heavy oak doors and windows with diamond panes, and its air of order, cleanliness and serenity, gave it a commanding ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... was aged about thirty but looked twenty, and wore a head-dress of grasses and ears of corn drooping over very black hair peppered with diamonds. With her long lashes against cheeks white with that transparency of complexion which characterizes women who have long led a cloistered existence, and a little ill at ease in her Parisian clothes, she resembled less one who had formerly been a woman of the harem than a nun who, having renounced her vows, was returning into ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet

... nevertheless believe with all their hearts in the Divine Fatherhood, is not such a recurring circumstance significant in itself? {108} Evidently, granting all the facts, more than one reading of the facts is possible; not cloistered mystics, or anchorites withdrawn from the world, but heroes engaged in fighting its ills, have steadfastly proclaimed that God is good; is it an altogether unreasonable hypothesis that their faith, if it outsoars ours, may be the result ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer

... Francisco has seen the master come home, and raised his weakening voice in requiem over the friend of his youth, he will seek once more his dear Paris, and find again his cloistered home near ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage

... conformed with hygienic laws. Her husband was a feeble creature, whose sole claim to distinction was his inability to speak English. At the time that "The Family," (which is, say, Frederica and Larry) returned, he had become quite blind, and he passed a cloistered existence in a dark corner of his little cottage, sitting, with his hat always upon his head, a being seemingly as withdrawn from the current of life as one of the smoky brown and white china dogs on the ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross

... later period, conducted more as a matter of commerce, and making of books became in time very profitable. The Church continued to hold the keys of knowledge and to control the means of productions; but the cloistered cell, where the monk or the layman, who had a penance to work off for a grave sin, had worked in solitude, gave way to the apartment specially set aside, where many persons could work together, usually under the direction of a librarius or chief scribe. In the more carefully ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather

... issue, in which there was no hope. Madame Claes resolved to know at least the outward attractions of this fatal science, and she began secretly to study chemistry in the books. From this time the family became, as it were, cloistered. ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac

... on another side, wholly pious and sacrificial. The Middle Ages were, in their way, merry, sturdy, and mischievous. A fresh breath, as of convalescence, breathed through their misery. Never was spring so green and lovely as when men greeted it in a cloistered garden, with hearts quite empty and clean, only half-awakened from a long trance of despair. It mattered little at such a moment where a work was to figure or whether any one should ever enjoy it. The pleasure ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... whether it is kind to let even a single tear fall, when an ocean of tears is pent up in hearts that would burst and overflow if but one drop should force its way out? Why across the sea came faint gusty stories, like low voices in the wind, of a cloistered garden and sunny seclusion—and a life of unknown and unexplained luxury. What is this picture of a pale face showered with streaming black hair, and large sad eyes looking upon lovely and noble children playing in the sunshine—and a brow pained with thought straining ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis

... itself, the cloister annihilates intelligence; the cloister bows the head, instead of raising it to heaven; the cold, humid atmosphere of the vaults passes by degrees into the blood, and penetrates the very marrow of the bones, changing the cloistered recluse into another granite statue in the convent. My brother, my dear brother, take heed; our time here below is but brief; youth visits us but once in our lives. The bright years of our earlier days will pass away too, for you are under the influence of a deep-seated grief; but at thirty years ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas

... If their looks displeased him they had to sleep outside. This custom of locking the gates every evening was highly characteristic of the spirit of the town, which was a commingling of cowardice, egotism, routine, exclusiveness, and devout longing for a cloistered life. Plassans, when it had shut itself up, would say to itself, "I am at home," with the satisfaction of some pious bourgeois, who, assured of the safety of his cash-box, and certain that no noise will disturb him, duly says his prayers and retires ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola

... whatever the choice you may make, you will occasion the future weal or woe of many, perhaps for many generations. Whether spouse of Jesus Christ or of man, whether mother of a family or of the poor, whether a cloistered nun or a celibate in the world, you will neither save nor lose your soul alone; the effects of your virtues or vices shall be reproduced, long after your departure from the scene of life, in the lives ...
— Serious Hours of a Young Lady • Charles Sainte-Foi

... bells peal across the snow; The frost's sharp arrows touch the earth and lo! How diamond-bright the stars do scintillate When Night hath lit her lamps to Heaven's gate. To the dim forest's cloistered arches go, And seek the holly and the mistletoe; For soon the bells of Christmas-tide will ring ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various

... Ridley and Latimer, of Ferrar and Hooper, of many another of less note, who died for the Glory of God, giving joyful testimony to the faith that was in them; the tragedy of Cranmer, the gentle soul of wavering courage, the man born to pass peaceful days in cloistered shades, torn from them to be the unwilling pilot of revolution, who at the tenth hour fell as Peter fell, yet at the last rose to the noblest height. Last, and greatest, the tragedy of the royal-hearted woman whose passionate human love was answered only with cold scorn; who won her throne by ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes

... itself and fertile in reminiscences to those who spent their boyhood there, would be weariness to the reader. Which of us all but remembers with delight, notwithstanding the bitterness of learning, the eccentric pleasures of that cloistered life? The sweetmeats purchased by stealth in the course of our walks, permission obtained to play cards and devise theatrical performances during the holidays, such tricks and freedom as were necessitated by our seclusion; ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac

... snowed off and on since the month began. In the dark, low rooms the fire burned all day. The dining-room, which had blue-green walls in imitation of Flemish tapestry and weathered-oak furniture, was darkened still more by the pines that gave a cloistered look to the view from our back windows into a small, square court, high-walled and spread with pine-needles. The rooms we used were two small ones united, done in white and yellow and with slim curtains which we could crush back upon the rods; but ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various

... and being gone, he is "himself again." Macbeth resolves to get rid of Macduff, that "he may sleep in spite of thunder;" and cheers his wife on the doubtful intelligence of Banquo's taking-off with the encouragement—"Then be thou jocund: ere the bat has flown his cloistered flight; ere to black Hecate's summons the shard-born beetle has rung night's yawning peal, there shall be done—a deed of dreadful note." In Lady Macbeth's speech "Had he not resembled my father as he slept, I had done 't," there is murder and filial piety together; and in urging him to fulfil ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin

... Fyne what work his wife was engaged on; but I marvelled to myself at her complete ignorance of the world, of her own sex and of the other kind of sinners. Yet, where could she have got any experience? Her father had kept her strictly cloistered. Marriage with Fyne was certainly a change but only to another kind of claustration. You may tell me that the ordinary powers of observation ought to have been enough. Why, yes! But, then, as she had set up for a guide and teacher, there was nothing surprising ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad

... she shivered violently. But she set her mouth until it was almost straight, and picked up the little dress. "Not that, perhaps," she said quietly in a moment. "I sometimes think I should like to be a nun, that, after all, it is my vocation. Not a cloistered one, for that is but a selfish life. But to teach, to do good, to forget myself. There are no convents in California, but I could join the Third Order of the Franciscans, and wear the gray habit, and be set aside by the world as one that only lived to make it a little better. ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton

... The cloistered seclusion of Gray's Inn grew daily more irksome. There he would sit, in mute despair, drumming the table with his fingers, and biting the quill, whose use he so bitterly contemned. Of winter afternoons he would stare through ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley

... in the Nassau Literary Magazine. But Tanaduke's genius absorbed the many colors of the age, and he took to the Bohemian life, to their great disappointment. He talked of Greenwich Village now instead of "noon-swirled moons," and met winter muses, unacademic, and cloistered by Forty-second Street and Broadway, instead of the Shelleyan dream-children with whom he had regaled their expectant appreciation. So they surrendered Tanaduke to the futurists, deciding that he and his flaming ties would do better there. Tom gave him the ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... died, then a third, and yet another; but there was no need to call further help from the Monastery, for the Plague was stayed. Never had cloistered monks spent such a strange season; ...
— The Gathering of Brother Hilarius • Michael Fairless

... departments across the hall. The younger stenographers, who had to get through with the enormous office correspondence, and who rushed about from one editor to another with wire baskets full of letters, made faces as they passed Ardessa's door and saw her cool and cloistered, daintily plying her needle. But no matter how hard the other stenographers were driven, no one, not even one of the five oracles of the staff, dared dictate so much as a letter to Ardessa. Like a sultan's bride, she was inviolate in her lord's absence; ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather

... it is true, as a modern Chinese philosopher has said, that the search for knowledge is a form of play, "then the spaceship, when it comes, will be the ultimate toy that may lead mankind from its cloistered nursery out into the ...
— The Practical Values of Space Exploration • Committee on Science and Astronautics

... the hanging bunches of pineapples and bananas. He looked into the saloon. It was bright though with half its lamps cold, but the barber's shop and the clerk's office were shut, and double curtains of silk and wool cloistered off the ladies' cabin. The fragrant bar stood open, and at two or three card-tables sat heavy-betting, hard-chewing quartets, but no one else was to be seen; even the third Hayle brother had gone to ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable



Words linked to "Cloistered" :   unworldly, monastic, reclusive, sequestered, cloistral, private, conventual, secluded



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