"Hermit" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he had fed with his own hands; and the daughter of Druses adorned one that she had, with rings of gold. These were, surely, instances of misplaced affection; but there is no accounting for tastes. It was but the other day that we read in the "Times" of a wealthy living English hermit, who delights in ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... him he could not imagine what a cat would be doing here in the heart of the dreaded Black Water Swamps. Surely no hermit could be living in such a dismal and inaccessible place; even a crazy man would never dream of passing over such a terribly slippery ledge in order to get to and from his ...
— Boy Scouts on a Long Hike - Or, To the Rescue in the Black Water Swamps • Archibald Lee Fletcher
... These leprous spots tis time they were remov'd. Come, goe with me: since I left Aquitayne And came acquaynted with these private walks, It was my happy chance to meet an Hermit Whose skill in Phisike warrants present cure And pure refining of your poysoned bloud. Ile bring you thither: afterward select Delicious sweets to decke your brothers tombe. ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. III • Various
... say now," she said. "If you say them again after you have lived on a hermit's fare for one whole day, I ...
— Vandrad the Viking - The Feud and the Spell • J. Storer Clouston
... thyme. In my harmas laboratory there are quite twenty of this Spider's burrows. Rarely do I pass by one of these haunts without giving a glance down the pit where gleam, like diamonds, the four great eyes, the four telescopes, of the hermit. The four others, which are much smaller, are not visible ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... adventurous, emotional Frenchman, who went to the dogs as easily and as rapidly as his own nature and his period allowed. And I should say, Lawford, that he made precious bad reading for a poor old troubled hermit like yourself ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... hermit!" she exclaimed. "What are you doing here, with your nose buried in an exercise book? There's no getting at you nowadays. You'll grow old before your time, Gwen, my child! Come out this instant, ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil
... in town and country, in the court and hermit's den, Sacrificer to the bright gods, ...
— Maha-bharata - The Epic of Ancient India Condensed into English Verse • Anonymous
... at the bar," said an eminent jurist, "a young man must live like a hermit and work like a horse. There is nothing that does a young lawyer so much good as to ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... Dominion," in those days, for one who really hungered for gore to distinguish himself. It would have been a glorious sight to see the gigantic captain, full of the fiery spirit that animated Peter the Hermit when exhorting his followers to the rescue of the holy sepulcher, charging gallantly at the head of his men into the place "where death reigneth." There were several of those places ...
— Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman - With Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War • J. H. (James Harvey) Kidd
... restless, slow, His home deserted for the lonely wood, Tormented with a wound he could not know, His, like all deep grief, plunged in solitude: I 'm fond myself of solitude or so, But then, I beg it may be understood, By solitude I mean a sultan's, not A hermit's, with a haram ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... Grail, where, on the outskirts of the forest, beside a spring, the old-grown Gurnemanz has built himself a hermit's cell. It is long after and much is changed. There is sadness in the air, but it is of an unfretful gentle sort, almost sweet; the sadness of a solitude visited by high thoughts, memories of calamity ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... attic. I am in the immediate neighbourhood of a great tavern and a famous place of amusement. The thoroughfare on which I can look whilst I sit at my window is noisy with perpetual traffic. In the midst of London I am more of a hermit than is that pretentious humbug who waves his flag at passing steamers from his rock in the AEgean. I am not a hermit from any choice of mine, or from any dislike of men and women. I am not a hermit because of any dislike which ...
— The Romance Of Giovanni Calvotti - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray
... crow, and lever, and gaff, and sling, And tongs, and tackle, and roller, and ring, They made a mighty effort to bring This hermit out of his cloister. They labored earnestly, day and night, Working by torch and lantern light, Till they had to acknowledge that, do what they might, They never ...
— The Universal Reciter - 81 Choice Pieces of Rare Poetical Gems • Various
... Tiraboschi and her Mazzuchelli; Spain in the Bibliothecas of Nicholas Antonio; and France, so rich in bibliographical treasures, affords models to every literary nation of every species of literary history. With us, the partial labour of the hermit Anthony for the Oxford writers, compiled before philosophical criticism existed in the nation; and Warton's History of Poetry, which was left unfinished at its most critical period, when that delightful antiquary ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... in a hut, with water and a crust, Is—Love, forgive us!—cinders, ashes, dust; Love in a palace is perhaps at last More grievous torment than a hermit's fast:— That is a doubtful tale from faery land, Hard for the non-elect to understand. Had Lycius liv'd to hand his story down, He might have given the moral a fresh frown, Or clench'd it quite: but too short was their bliss To ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... Bluebirds and Robins, on their olive or russet-brown backs and light-tinted, dark-spotted breasts, but have the most beautiful voices in all Birdland. The names of these wonderful singers, who make a musical quartette, are Wood Thrush, Hermit Thrush, Wilson's Thrush, and Olive-backed Thrush; but you will have to keep both your eyes and ears open to learn to tell them apart and ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... to Miss Gale whether she made Miss Dover's blood run cold or not, she paid no attention, but proceeded with her reflections. "The only thing that spoils it is the smoke of those engines, reminding one that in two hours you or I, or that pastoral old hermit there in a smock-frock, and a pipe—and oh, what bad tobacco!—can be wrenched out of this paradise, and shrieked and rattled off and flung into that wilderness of brick called London, where the hearts ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... in the religious and literate institution of the Northumbrians. Another island, of still less importance, in the mouth of the Tees [Tweed?], and called Lindisfarne, was about this time sanctified by the austerities of an hermit called Cuthbert. It soon became also a very celebrated monastery. It was, from a dread of the ravages of pirates, removed first to the adjacent part of the continent, and on the same account finally to Durham. The heads of this monastery omitted nothing which could contribute ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... turned his back on personal ambition, laid aside the glory of military renown, and sat himself down to a hermit's life and a scholar's labors on the promontory of Sagres, in the province of Algarve, that point on the coast of Portugal which stretches farthest out into the Atlantic in the direction of his hope. Here he built an observatory whose light was the last ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... lawn-looking fields, which glowed at the proper season with the myriad green and white pinnies of corn and cotton. At the foot of the cottage lay a delightful shrubbery, which almost covered it up from sight. It was altogether such a retreat as a hermit would desire. It reminded me somewhat of the lovely spot which we had left. A pleasant walk of a mile lay between it and the town where I proposed to practice, and this furnished a necessity for a certain degree of ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... But I expect you'll be too busy thinking about that new friend of yours, and perhaps his sister. What did she tell me we had got to do? 'To her garlands let us bring,' was it not? You and I will both send wreaths, Michael, though not for her funeral. Now don't be a hermit any more, but come and see me. You shall take your garland girl into dinner, if she will come, too; and her brother shall certainly sit next me. I am so glad you have become yourself at last. Go on being yourself more and more, my ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... new ones very frequently. To judge by his reading, he was a man of letters. But so wide-reading a man of letters must have an object, a literary purpose in all probability. Why should not he be writing a novel? Not a novel of society, assuredly, for a hermit is not the person to report the talk and manners of a world which he has nothing to do with. Novelists and lawyers understand the art of "cramming" better than any other persons in the world. Why should not this young man be working up the picturesque ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... to shun mankind, and let the Phoenix monish, For the reports of hermit fame, from ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... Harold, at his age, who never touched liquor, and had lived a sort of hermit life in the Bush, to be saddled with a wife only to have destroyed her! The story contradicted itself by its own absurdity; and those two Miss Stympsons were well-known scandal-mongers. Miss Woolmer never believed a story ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to a place for sitting, not for shelter; that he fashions no other dwelling; that a couple generally occupies the same or some neighbouring tree, each sitting upon its own nest; that the Nchigo is not a "hermit" nor a rare, nor even a very timid animal; that it dwells, as I saw, near villages, and that its cry, "Aoo! Aoo! Aoo!" is often heard by them in the mornings and evenings. During my subsequent wanderings ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... latch with care, And now she must brave the chill night air. She has violet eyes and ruby lips, A dancing shape—and away she skips; She hies to the haunt of a hermit weird, With flaming eyes and a forky beard, A shocking wizard—who, gossips say, Has dwelt in ...
— London Lyrics • Frederick Locker
... most effective relics, then the cross and the tomb must be conquered at any cost. In the north of Europe especially, misery was so acute that the people gladly left their homes upon the slenderest promise of betterment, even following a vagrant like Peter the Hermit, who was neither soldier nor priest. There is a passage in William of Tyre which has been often quoted to explain a frenzy which is otherwise inexplicable, and in the old English of Caxton the words still glow with the same agony which ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... select for his table just the plants we had marked for ours. He also nibbled our young beans; and so at last we were reluctantly obliged to let John Gardiner set a trap for him. Poor old simple- minded hermit, he was too artless for this world! He was caught at the very first snap, and found dead in the trap,—the agitation and distress having broken his poor woodland heart, and killed him. We were grieved to the very soul when the poor fat old fellow was dragged ...
— Queer Little Folks • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... his brother and put him with all his faithful followers to the sword; but by a wonderful interposition of Providence this bad brother was converted from his evil intention, for just as he entered the skirts of the wild forest he was met by an old religious man, a hermit, with whom he had much talk and who in the end completely turned his heart from his wicked design. Thenceforward he became a true penitent, and resolved, relinquishing his unjust dominion, to spend the remainder of his days in a religious house. The first act of his newly conceived ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... Chateaubriand, Beaumarchais, Lauzun, Gibbon, Bayle, St. Pierre, Alfieri, Casti, Cuvier, La Bruyore, Wieland, Swift, Sterne, Le Sage, Goethe, scraps of the classics, and the Book of Job. Absolute originality in a late age is only possible to the hermit, the lunatic, or the sensation novelist. Byron, like the rovers before Minos, was not ashamed of his piracy. He transferred the random prose of his own letters and journals to his dramas, and with the same complacency made use of the ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... wild goats. Here on this lake, lived great flocks of swans and geese and ducks; as the old men say, there was a power of birds of every kind. Now they have vanished like a cloud. Beside the hamlets and villages, you see, I have dotted down here and there the various settlements, farms, hermit's caves, and water-mills. This country carried a great many cattle and horses, as you can see by the quantity of blue paint. For instance, see how thickly it lies in this part; there were great herds of them here, an average ...
— Uncle Vanya • Anton Checkov
... darkening aisles of the great Sequoia grove. The majestic trunks, beautiful in color and in symmetry, rose round us like the pillars of a mightier cathedral than ever was conceived even by the fervor of the Middle Ages. Hermit thrushes sang beautifully in the evening, and again, with a burst of wonderful music, at dawn. I was interested and a little surprised to find that, unlike John Burroughs, John Muir cared little for birds or bird songs, and knew little about them. The hermit-thrushes ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... his reckoning. He was the friend of Anthony, and when dying begged to be wrapt in the cloak given him by that holy monk, who had himself received it as a present from Athanasius. His friends and admirers claimed for Paul the honour of being the first Christian hermit, and they maintained their improbable opinion by asserting that he had been a monk for ninety-seven years, and that he had retired to the desert at the age of sixteen, when the Church was persecuted in the reign of Valerian. All Egypt believed that the monks were ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... determined to remain here," she repeated, "so you may as well take it cheerfully, auntie. If you intend staying with the Perritons any length of time, of course I shall see you often, and meet them. I haven't come down here to the Cape to play the hermit, I assure you. But I am settled here with Cap'n Amazon, and I am comfortable. So, why should I make ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... wonderful gifts are usually bestowed upon those who are described by the epithets rough and uneducated. The rough and uneducated are the chosen vessels into which God pours the elixirs at which we marvel. From among the rough and uneducated, prophets arise—an Apostle Peter, or St. Peter the Hermit. Wherever mental power is imprisoned, and remains intact and entire for want of an outlet in conversation, in politics, in literature, in the imaginings of the scholar, in the efforts of the statesman, in the conceptions of the inventor, ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... twenty-three years old never knew the possibilities of happiness latent in another person's coin. At that time Providence threw me into a deep sleep and revealed to me in a dream the folly of labor. "Behold," said a vision of a holy hermit, "the poverty and squalor of your lot and listen to the teachings of nature. You rise in the morning from your pallet of straw and go forth to your daily labor in the fields. The flowers nod their heads in friendly salutation as you pass. The lark greets ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... is of a middle stature, dark-coloured hair, the most bewitching leer with her eyes, the most roguish cast! her cheeks are dimpled when she smiles, and her smiles would tempt an hermit. ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... vision of things. It is as if the air of the Mediterranean itself, thin, brilliant, had been hammered into cadences. The verse is leaping and free, full of echoes and refrains. The images are sudden and unlabored like the images in the Greek anthology: a hermit released from Nebuchadnezzar's spell gets to his feet "like a bear standing upright"; fishing boats being shoved off the beach slide into the sea one by one "like village girls joining a dance"; on a rough day the smacks with reefed sails "skip like goats at the harbor entrance." ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... reflected with some satisfaction, wasn't much. The Patriarch was over eighty years of age, and he had come, deaf and dumb, to Needley sixty years ago—nobody knew from where, nor his previous history, nor his name. They had called him the Hermit at first, for immediately on his arrival he had gone out to the shore of the ocean, away from the village, and built a crude hut there for himself—which, in the after years, he had made into a more pretentious dwelling. The cures had come "kinder gradual-like an' took ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... point, and showed us Mackinac in the distance, we discovered that the island was a mutual friend, and that we knew each other, at least by name; for the silver-haired priest was Father Piret, the hermit of the Chenaux. In the old days, when I was living at the little white fort, I had known Father Piret by reputation, and he had heard of me from the French half-breeds around the point. We landed. The summer ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... to this secluded spot at this unseasonable moment and be satisfied with my own society—no, not my own society, but that of these kind brotherly mountains. From a prosaic pedant I can almost feel myself becoming an ecstatical hermit, and my ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... man called Zalmoxis, who, after having explored the ways and wonders of the gods in distant travel in foreign lands, and having thoroughly studied in particular the wisdom of the Egyptian priests and of the Greek Pythagoreans, had returned to his native country to endhis life as a pious hermit in a cavern of the "holy mountain." He remained accessible only to the king and his servants, and gave forth to the king and through him to the people his oracles with reference to every important undertaking. He was regarded ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... him, and Samson said to him, "Now, Signor Don Quixote, when we have just had news that the Lady Dulcinea is disenchanted, do you come out with this? and now we are upon the point of turning shepherds, to spend our lives singing like princes, do you wish to make yourself a hermit? Peace, on your life; come to yourself ...
— The Children's Hour, v 5. Stories From Seven Old Favorites • Eva March Tappan
... interpretation of the means of attainment of that state of liberation, which has been alluded to in so many varied terms. The fact that Buddha, like many of the Oriental Masters, sought the seclusion of the forest; the isolation, and simplicity of the hermit,—has given rise to the belief, almost universally held among Oriental disciples, that liberation from maya, the delusions of the world, can not be attained save ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... woe, Wrapped in a gown, for sickness, and for show. The fair ones feel such maladies as these, When each new night-dress gives a new disease. A constant vapour o'er the palace flies; Strange phantoms rising as the mists arise; Dreadful as hermit's dreams in haunted shades, Or bright as visions of expiring maids. Now glaring fiends, and snakes on rolling spires, Pale spectres, gaping tombs, and purple fires: Now lakes of liquid gold, Elysian scenes, And crystal domes ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... men and their interests. This man, who baffled for a long time the rector's perspicacity and who might in a higher sphere have proved another l'Hopital, incapable of intrigue like all really profound persons, was by this time living in the contemplative state of an ancient hermit. Independent through privation, no personal consideration acted on his mind; he knew the laws and judged impartially. His life, reduced to the merest necessaries, was pure and regular. The peasants loved Monsieur Clousier and respected him for the disinterested ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... work. For if man is a social animal his power to do his bit and his consequent happiness must be derived, in part at least, from his social environment. The lonely craftsman perfecting his art in the solitude of a one-man workshop does not correspond with our industrial ideal any more than the hermit or the monk corresponds with our general religious ideal. It was the great apostle of craftsmanship, William Morris, who best set forth the social ideal of industry in his immortal sentence: 'Fellowship ...
— Progress and History • Various
... which Babbage called Stuart's Creek, he traced to a large salt lake, which he christened Lake Gregory, now known as Lake Eyre. From here he made to a range which he called Hermit Range, but from its summit could see no sign of Lake Torrens, and came to the just conclusion that it did not extend so far. West of Lake Eyre the explorers found a hot spring, and afterwards many ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... derive thence. Chivalry is born. The knight beholds in his lady's face on earth the image of Our Lady in Heaven, the Virgin-Mother of the Redeemer of men. From the grave of his dead mistress Ramon Lull withdraws to a hermit's cell to ponder the beauty that is imperishable; and over the grave of Beatrice, Dante rears a shrine, a temple more awful, more sublime than any which even that age has carved ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... there, when one remembers that for six or eight months of the year the land is ice-bound. On the island we visited a small church, within the sacred precincts of which no woman's foot dare tread, but we had a peep at another chapel where a hermit once lived. He never spoke to any one for seven years, and slept nightly in his coffin, in which he was not buried, however, it being necessary to keep the article ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... seen every day, hopping about briskly on the meadows and uttering his cheery, enlivening call. The black-headed grosbeak, too, is here, with the Bullock oriole, and western tanager, brown song-sparrow, hermit thrush, the purple finch,—a fine singer, with head and throat of a rosy-red hue,—several species of warblers and vireos, kinglets, ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir
... he said, with quiet approval. "You are such a hermit, Mrs. Denvers, that it will be quite ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... dignity of spirit, such as became her noble blood, but of excellent understanding and lively talents." Under her auspices a poem of Goldsmith's had an aristocratical introduction to the world. This was the beautiful ballad of the Hermit, originally published under the name of Edwin and Angelina. It was suggested by an old English ballad beginning "Gentle Herdsman," shown him by Dr. Percy, who was at that time making his famous collection, entitled ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... besmeared, and white with foam, While big the tears of anguish pour, He seeks, amid the forest's gloom, The humble hermit's ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... the hermit, but he declined to come, saying that he was too old and decrepit to leave his retreat. "What shall I do?" exclaimed Genji, "shall I visit him privately?" Eventually, taking four or five attendants, he ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... gone farthest in folly, and have thereby led things into a state of confusion which I myself could not make straight again, even if I were a sage—which I certainly never shall be any more than a tortoise or a phoenix. I once heard tell of a hermit who, because it is written that we ought to bury the dead, and because he had no corpse, slew a traveller that he might fulfil the commandment: I have acted in exactly the same way, for, in order to spare another man suffering and to bear the sins of another, I have plunged an innocent woman ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Mr. McCarthy's phrases very happily chosen to convey his meaning. Surely a gaunt emaciated frame and a sharp eagle face are the very characteristics which we should picture to ourselves as belonging to Peter the Hermit, or Scott's Ephraim Macbriar in Old Mortality. However unimpressive the look of an eagle may be in Mr. McCarthy's opinion, I do not agree with him ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... song-book mentioned by the HERMIT OF HOLYPORT must have been published between 1781 and 1810, as the many popular works printed for S. and W. Koene may testify. In 1798 they lived on the Linde gracht, but shifted afterwards their dwelling-place to the Boomstraat. For ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 71, March 8, 1851 • Various
... How strange is the comparison instituted by the Times between the rush to Fraser River and the mediaeval crusades, which carried so large a portion of the population of Europe to die on the burning plains of Palestine! At Clermont Ferrand, Peter the Hermit has concluded his discourse; cries are heard in every quarter, "It is the will of God! It is the will of God!"; Every one assumes the cross, and the crowd disperses to prepare for conquering under the ...
— Handbook to the new Gold-fields • R. M. Ballantyne
... Hermes being the same names, it is manifest of what antiquity is the system ascribed to the former. As to the name of Samanean, it is precisely that of Chaman, still preserved in Tartary, China, and India. The interpretation given to it is, man of the woods, a hermit mortifying the flesh, such being the characteristic of this sect; but its literal meaning is, celestial (Samaoui) and explains the system of those who are called by it.—The system is the same as that of the sectaries of Orpheus, of the ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... the angel who conducted Parnell's Hermit, some heavenly guide had pointed out to an invisible witness of this quiet scene of domestic happiness, the secrets that were buried under its smooth surface, what a start of horror would he not have given, how would he not have shuddered if that angel had said, "Look upon those three ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... of crab that likes to live in a shell; so if they find one empty, they take possession of it; they are called "hermit crabs." We often used to pick up a shell with a crab ...
— Scenes in the Hawaiian Islands and California • Mary Evarts Anderson
... in my bosom swell, Lone wand'ring by the hermit's mossy cell: The sweeping theatre of hanging woods; Th' incessant roar ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... of a young man of twenty-five, a tall fellow with a very unattractive face who had this feeling of inferiority almost to the point of agony, especially in the presence of young women, but also in any situation where he would be noticed. He was fast becoming a hermit when he discovered that a few drinks completely removed this feeling. From that time on he became a steady drinker, with now and then a short period when he would try to stop drinking, only to resume when he found himself obsessed again ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... exact age was forty-five. His most singular characteristic was a fine, almost spiritual intelligence, which showed in the dewy brightness of the eye, in the lighted face, in the cadenced definiteness of his speech. One would have said, knowing nothing of him, that he was a hermit; but again, noting the firm, graceful outlines of his body, that he was a soldier. Within the past twenty-four hours he had had a fight for life with one of the terrible "colds" which, like an unstayed plague, close up the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Decency, forgive these friendly Rhimes, For raking in the dunghill of their crimes. To name each Monster wou'd make Printing dear, Or tire Ned Ward, who writes six Books a-year. Such vicious Nonsense, Impudence, and Spite, Wou'd make a Hermit, or a Father write. Tho' Julian rul'd the World, and held no more Than deist Gildon taught, or Toland swore, Good Greg'ry[48] prov'd him execrably bad, And scourg'd his Soul, with drunken Reason mad. Much longer, Pope restrain'd his awful hand, Wept ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... awaited us at the door. He had been sent on two or three days in advance, to take charge of the house, and seemed to have had enough of hermit-life, for he hailed us with a wild whoop, throwing his straw hat half-way up one of the poplars. Perkins was a boy of fifteen, the child of poor parents, who were satisfied to get him off their hands, regardless as to what humanitarian theories might be ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... and dales without meeting any, till he came to the foot of a very high mountain. Here he knocked at the door of a small and lonely house; and an old man, with a head as white as snow, let him in. "Good father" said Jack, "can you lodge a traveller who has lost his way?" "Yes," said the hermit, "I can, if you will accept such fare as my poor house affords." Jack entered, and the old man set before him some bread and fruit for his supper. When Jack had eaten as much as he chose, the hermit said, "My son, I know you are the famous conqueror ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... The speaker is the wise old hermit Trevrizent, who has cleared up for Parzival the mystery of the Grail and led him to inward peace. 6: In Book 6 it is related that Parzival, riding away from the castle of the Grail, comes upon three drops of blood in the snow—the blood of a wild goose that had been attacked ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... down from the rock where she had been sitting, and answered evasively, "I don't think there is any mainly, unless it is that when I had such a good chance to be a hermit, I couldn't remember all those wonderful Mahatma practices that make one so good and so wise. The only formulas I have really tried hard to recall are for cooking without ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... an aged hermit, carrying a pair of balances, with an hour-glass in either of them—one hour-glass white, the other black: he is brought in by a number of ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... shall hinder me from making you repent of it.' I was going to speak, but he stopped my mouth with words full of anger; and so I was obliged to leave his palace, rejected, banished, an outcast from the world, and not knowing what would become of me. And so I became a hermit. ...
— Fairy Tales From The Arabian Nights • E. Dixon
... iniquitous schemes, and grieve for oppressed merit. You, who see these things every day, think me as unreasonable, in making them matter of complaint, as if I seriously lamented the change of seasons. You should consider I have lived almost a hermit ten years, and the world is as new to me as to a country girl transported from Wales to Coventry. I know I ought to think my lot very good, that can boast of some sincere friends ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... whose ambition it had been to combine the hermit's indifference to social obligations with an indulgence in social festivities, the blow was a cruel one; and the more cruel because he realised that Clarice's criticism contained a grain of truth. He hit back cruelly. 'Drake tells me he thinks ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... I from off my couch serene, Woods, meadows, towns and seas have seen; And in one wood, beside a cave, A hermit kneeling by a grave:— The which I felt so touched to see I wept a shower of sympathy. And in one mead I saw, methought, A brave, dark-armored knight, who fought A shining-dragon in a mist, That, ...
— Thoughts, Moods and Ideals: Crimes of Leisure • W.D. Lighthall
... dispersed, I believe. I made it a present to my excellent physician, Dr. Schall or Scholl (I am not certain of the name). I never saw it after turning hermit there.'" ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 195, July 23, 1853 • Various
... here remarked, with a dangerous smile, that, if she met any one who bore that resemblance, she might be tempted to keep him with her,—a playfulness that brought the ready color to Rand's cheek. When she added to this the greater audacity of kissing her hand to him, the young hermit actually turned away in sheer embarrassment. When he looked around again, she was gone, and for the first time in his experience the mountain ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... demanded of the world in general, namely, patent blacking, and he got nothing but grease. Accordingly, he at last drew back from all men, and became a hermit; but the church tower is the only place in a great city where hermitage, office and bread can be found together. So he betook himself up thither, and smoked his pipe as he made his solitary rounds. He looked upward and downward, ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... the people had long become accustomed to the Norman yoke, when there was much talk among them of a hermit, who dwelt in a cell not far from the town, in the utmost penitence and humility. He was seldom seen, his face was deeply scarred, and he had lost his left eye, and nothing was known of his name or history; but he was deeply revered for his sanctity, and when Henry Beauclerc once visited ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... greenwood. This Ywain duly does, supporting himself at first on the raw flesh of game which he kills with a bow and arrows wrested from a chance-comer; and then on less savage but still simple food supplied by a benevolent hermit. As he lies asleep under a tree, a lady rides by with attendants, and one of these (another of the wise damsels of romance) recognises him as Sir Ywain. The lady has at the time sore need of a champion against a hostile earl, and she also fortunately possesses a box of ointment infallible against ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... knell is rung By forms unseen their dirge is sung; There Honor comes, a pilgrim gray, To bless the turf that wraps their clay; And Freedom shall awhile repair, To dwell a weeping hermit there! ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... more liberal of edicts and anathemas than of orders on the treasury of Spain, that money and rations are evermore wanting. If these Protestants persist in their stand against us, I shall have to go forth to all the Catholic cities of the empire, preaching, like Peter the hermit, to obtain contributions from ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... rescue! Hierax, a Christian, is taken and tortured in the theatre!' thundered a wild hermit, his beard and hair streaming about his ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... is the same in the mouth of a hermit, or a prince, since it is not reason, but weakness, that makes us rate counsel by our esteem for the counsellor, let us, at length, desist from this inquiry, so useless in itself, in which we have room to hope for so little satisfaction. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... expression. Also at that period, which Louisa herself in her diary calls the "sentimental period," she was strongly influenced by the poet and naturalist, Thoreau. From him she learned to know Nature in a closer and more loving intimacy. Thoreau was called a hermit, and known as a genius, and more often than not he could be found in his hut in the woods, or on the river bank, where he learned to look for the bright-eyed "Alcott girl," who would swing along his side in twenty-mile tramps, ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... expiate his detestable apostasy and to atone for it by his devotion to humanity. His will appeared so fixed that Da Nova was forced to consent, and he left him there, having given him at his request various seeds of fruits and vegetables. It must be added that this singular hermit worked for four years at the clearing and planting of the island with such success, that ships were soon able to call there to revictual during their long passage from Europe to the Cape of ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... in the Kootenay country," said Bruce. "Reg'lar hermit, I guess you'd call him. Came out of the mountains only twice a year to get grub. He made pets of grizzlies. For years he had one as big as this fellow we're chasing. He got 'im when a cub, an 'when I saw him he weighed a thousand pounds an' followed Jameson wherever he went like ...
— The Grizzly King • James Oliver Curwood
... differ as much in nervous structure and in theological creeds as they do in personal appearance; some may accept the monks' belief implicitly, while others may suggest that the original occupant of the cave was some unknown hermit secluded from the world, whose solitary lamp burning before the Virgin had attracted the attention of the shepherds from the mountain opposite. The old man may have fallen down a precipice and died, leaving his lamp still alight; but it would be unfair to interfere with the original ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... this time. A few grimy colliers; some chair-turners amid their huts and white chips on the edge of a hidden hamlet; drovers with forest ponies going for Waisford or Market Basing; the hospitality and interminable devotions of a hermit by a mossy crucifix on Two Manors Waste; one night alone in a ruined chapel on the top of a down:—of such were the encounters and events of his journey. He was no Don Quixote to make desperadoes or feats of endurance out of such gear; on the contrary, he persistently enjoyed ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... If he lived the life which is there described, few saints have a better claim to the title than Buddha; and no one either in the Greek or the Roman Church need be ashamed of having paid to his memory the honour that was intended for St. Josaphat, the prince, the hermit, and the saint." ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... Hannaquoi, Hermit, a white, Hia-hia, History of Brazil, Southey's, Horned screamer, Houtou, Howling monkey, see Monkeys Hudson, journey ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... best historical grounds for our position. Sometimes great religious movements have been begun by unlearned and uncritical men like Peter the hermit or John Bunyan or Moody. But we must not infer from this that religious insight is naturally repressed by clear thinking or fostered by ignorance. Dr. Francis Greenwood Peabody has pointed out that the ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... Franciscan order and its branches, see VOL. XX, p. 91. The Capuchins were originally Observantine Franciscans, and date from 1526, when their founder, Matteo di Bassi, of Urbino, Italy, obtained papal consent to live, with his companions, a hermit life, wear a habit with long pointed cowl (capuche, whence their name), and preach the gospel in all lands. At first they were subject to the general of the conventual Franciscans, not obtaining exemption from this obedience until 1617. Early in the eighteenth century the ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... of his demeanour had returned to Aram; he had mastered those moody fits we have referred to, which had so afflicted his affectionate visitors; and he now seemed to prepare and buoy himself up against that awful ordeal of life and death, which he was about so soon to pass. Yet he,—the hermit of Nature, who— ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... could speak, Yvon broke in. "He shall come! I tell him he shall come, Valerie! All my life I perish, thou knowest it, for a companion of my sex, of my age. Thou art my angel, Valerie, but thou art a woman, and soon, too, thou wilt leave me. Alone, a hermit in my chateau, my heart desolate, how to support life? It is for this that I cry to the friend of my house to return to his country, the country of his race; to bring here his respected father, to plant a vineyard, a little ...
— Rosin the Beau • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... be identified from any other by the reddish brown tail which is in marked contrast to the color of the back. The nesting habits and eggs of this species are precisely like those of the eastern Hermit Thrush, which is a ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... "you are quite right. It is the best time to visit this coast. But why make a hermit of yourself? You are a family friend. Come and stay with us at the Hall for as long as you like. It will give me the utmost pleasure to welcome you there," he went on earnestly, "and as for this little place, of what use is it to you? Let me buy it from you. You are a man of the ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... in the place had been developed by a brooding fancy into a fixed feeling, I cannot well say; but certainly, as often as he came—and he liked to visit the spot, and would sometimes spend hours in it—he felt like a hermit of the wilderness cut off from human society, and was haunted with a vague sense of neighbouring hostility. Probably it came of an historical fancy that the nook ought to be theirs, combined with the sense that it was not. But there had been no injury done ab extra: the family had suffered from ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... hundred francs must keep life in me for three years—the time I allowed myself in which to bring to light a work which should draw attention to me, and make me either a name or a fortune. I exulted at the thought of living on bread and milk, like a hermit in the Thebaid, while I plunged into the world of books and ideas, and so reached a lofty sphere beyond the tumult of Paris, a sphere of silent labor where I would entomb myself like a chrysalis to await a brilliant and splendid new ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... declension you As short such substantives must view, The genitives of which increase, Derived from nominatives in es, And have an accent short upon The syllable that's last but one. As mil{e}s, seg{e}s, div{e}s, (which Means what a Poet is n't,)— rich: But pEs is long, with bipEs, tripEs, Like to a hermit munching dry pease. To these add CerEs, Saturn's cub, (Name of a goddess, and for grub The figure Metonymy through,) And ariEs, abiEs, pariEs, too. Sum with its compounds forming {e}s, } Are short, join pen{e}s, if you please, ...
— The Comic Latin Grammar - A new and facetious introduction to the Latin tongue • Percival Leigh
... vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... wonderful in that!" said Burkin. "There are plenty of people in the world, solitary by temperament, who try to retreat into their shell like a hermit crab or a snail. Perhaps it is an instance of atavism, a return to the period when the ancestor of man was not yet a social animal and lived alone in his den, or perhaps it is only one of the diversities of human character—who knows? I am not a ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... where old Clarinax is set, His sundry Simples sorting, From whose experience we may get What worthy is reporting. Then Lelipa let vs draw neere, Whilst he his weedes is weathering, I see some powerfull Simples there That he hath late bin gathering. Hail gentle Hermit, Iove thee speed, And haue thee in his keeping, 10 And euer helpe thee at thy need, Be thou awake ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... loaded with the chains of an exacting court etiquette, but she was free, she was privileged. So that she paid her duty to the King once a day and passed the pleasant word, nothing further was required of her. Naturally, then, she made herself a hermit, and grieved the weary days through in her own apartments, with her thoughts and devotions for company, and the planning of now forever unrealizable military combinations for entertainment. In fancy she moved bodies of men from this and that and the other point, so ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... been written of the historic campaign of 1840. The enthusiasm has been called "frenzy" and "crazy fanatacism." It has also been likened to the crusading spirit, aroused by the preaching of Peter the Hermit. "The nation," said Clay, "was like the ocean when convulsed by some terrible storm." Webster declared that "every breeze says change; the cry, the universal cry, is for a change." Long before campaigns usually begin New York ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... and amuses himself with things of this sort. In old times there really was a hermit here, and this is his effigy. Come down these narrow stairs, if you please, and see the ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... welcome at the court, the king's brother Henry, and others, riding out to greet him at his approach. The people were less cordial. His assumed devotion could not deceive those who knew him to be a devotee of pleasure.[1198] His appearance forcibly reminded them of the old story of Master Fox turned hermit, and cries of "Au Renard! Au Renard!" were so loudly uttered when he was seen in the streets preceded by an attendant carrying a large silver cross, the badge of his office, that he was soon fain to discard the obnoxious emblem.[1199] This ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... was quite as mysterious a being to Tom as the Man in the Moon. It immediately occurred to him that the lonely creature who held himself aloof from all mankind in that pillar like some old hermit was the very man of whom to ask his way. Cold, he might be; little sympathy he had, perhaps, with human passion—the column seemed too tall for that; but if Truth didn't live in the base of the Monument, notwithstanding Pope's couplet about the outside ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... myself out at all; at any hour of the day, at any period that seems favourable, I have the requisite elements before my eyes. Ah, dear village, so poor, so countrified, how happily inspired was I when I came to ask of you a hermit's retreat, where I could live in the company of my beloved insects and, in so doing, set down not too unworthily a few chapters of their ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... thus miserable abroad, I will soon return to England, and follow your example, I think—turn hermit, or some plaguy thing or other, and see what a constant course of penitence and mortification will do for me. There is no living at this rate—d—n me if ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... never spoke, but for whom he now thought himself a proper match.(362) Don't you think he would make a very proper preceptor? Among other candidates, they talk of Dr. hales, the old philosopher, a poor good primitive creature, whom I call the Santon Barsisa; do you remember the hermit in the Persian tales, who after living in the odour of sanctity for above ninety years, was tempted to be naughty with the King's daughter, who had been sent to his cell for a cure? Santon Hales but two years ago accepted the post of ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... violent dislike to houses and rooms and tableclothes and clean hands, and all the absurd paraphernalia of civilised existence. Of course, I suppose I shall become rational again in time, but at present I thought of having a tent on the lawn and becoming a hermit." ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... formed a triumvirate of holy, eloquent, and erudite defenders of truth and justice; Ambrose was by his faith and piety illumining the See of Milan; the Christian Cicero, Chrysostom, was pouring forth at Constantinople streams of golden eloquence; Jerome, the hermit of Bethlehem, was giving his masterly expositions of Scripture. And Augustine arose in this galaxy of greatness and genius to shed glory on the land and church of Africa, which had seen its Tertullian and been adorned ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... city of magnificent distances. We discover why it was that we never got beyond compliments and surfaces with them before; we become aware of as many versts between us and them as there are between a wandering Tartar and a Chinese town. The thoughtful man becomes a hermit in the thoroughfares of the market-place. Impassable seas suddenly find their level between us, or dumb steppes stretch themselves out there. It is the difference of constitution, of intelligence, and faith, and not streams and mountains, that make the true and impassable ...
— A Plea for Captain John Brown • Henry David Thoreau
... he stepped into the lane, dark with dense maple-trees and echoing faintly with the notes of the hermit thrush, he saw the light of the little house glimmer through the trees in so exactly the spot where his hungering eyes sought it that his heart gave a great hammering leap ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... clad in mourning weeds, upon a mangy jade unmeetly set, with a lewd fool called Disdain" (canto 6). Timias and Serena, after quitting the hermit's cell, meet her. Though so sorely clad and mounted, the maiden was "a lady of great dignity and honor, but scornful and proud." Many a wretch did languish for her through a long life. Being summoned to Cupid's judgment hall, the sentence passed on her was ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... blind corner we saw Aristotle holding a lantern in the posture in which the hermit uses to be drawn near St. Christopher, watching, prying, thinking, and setting ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... to which was a door of iron, then moving his head, and once more licking the hands of his companion, the generous animal left him, and retired back to the woods. The youth now went to the cave, and having knocked at the door, it was opened by a venerable hermit, who bade him welcome, brought him warm water to wash his feet, and set before him refreshments of various kinds. When he had eaten, he inquired the cause of his coming to such a desolate country; ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 4 • Anon.
... repeatedly been amused, on reading passages from Cursor Mundi and Hampole to men of education, both English and Scotch, to hear them all pronounce the dialect 'Old Scotch.' Great has been the surprise of the latter especially on being told that Richard the Hermit [i.e. of Hampole] wrote in the extreme south of Yorkshire, within a few miles of a locality so thoroughly English as Sherwood Forest, with its memories of Robin Hood. Such is the difficulty which people have in separating the natural and ethnological ...
— English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day • Walter W. Skeat
... narrow comb wherein Where slabs of rock with figures, knights on horse Sculptured, and deckt in slowly-waning hues. 'Sir Knave, my knight, a hermit once was here, Whose holy hand hath fashioned on the rock The war of Time against the soul of man. And yon four fools have sucked their allegory From these damp walls, and taken but the form. Know ye not these?' and Gareth lookt and ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... and swept Through coppice, clump, and dell, Within that holy circle slept Calm as in hermit's cell. ...
— Poems of the Past and the Present • Thomas Hardy
... beautiful: an affecting union of chivalrous magnanimity on the one part, and on the other of the virgin openness of a heart which, brought up far from the world on an uninhabited island, has never learned to disguise its innocent movements. The wisdom of the princely hermit Prospero has a magical and mysterious air; the disagreeable impression left by the black falsehood of the two usurpers is softened by the honest gossipping of the old and faithful Gonzalo; Trinculo and Stephano, two good-for-nothing ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... of the lake there rose a great rock, whereon dwelt an aged hermit, who by reason of his loneliness was afflicted with a spirit of melancholy; so that when the fit was on him, he was constantly tempted to throw himself into the water, for his life was burdensome to ...
— Old-Fashioned Fairy Tales • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing |
