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Cloistered   /klˈɔɪstərd/   Listen
Cloistered

adjective
1.
Of communal life sequestered from the world under religious vows.  Synonyms: cloistral, conventual, monastic, monastical.
2.
Providing privacy or seclusion.  Synonyms: reclusive, secluded, sequestered.  "Sat close together in the sequestered pergola" , "Sitting under the reclusive calm of a shade tree" , "A secluded romantic spot"






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Cloistered" Quotes from Famous Books



... see it rolling along whilst they take their rest. The gentlemen also draw up their prancing steeds, though not within hail of the carriages, but they in the fresh air and under the green trees have as much advantage over the Seoras as the wandering friar has over the cloistered nun. ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca

... and gross. The fact was that he had a perfectly simple manliness about him, and an infallible tact, which was wholly unaffected, as to the limits of decorum. The result was that one could talk to him with the utmost plainness and directness. His was not a cloistered and secluded temperament. He knew the world, and had no fear of it or shrinking ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson

... the common life as a man of his patrician instincts and cloistered habits could. I could go to him with any new find about it and be sure of delighting him; after I began making my involuntary and all but unconscious studies of Yankee character, especially in the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... little Cappella Santa is a rich and lovely Giovanni Bellini, with sacred relics in jars above and below it, and outside is the gay little cloistered garden of the still existing monastery, with a figure of S. Francis in the midst of ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas

... to which our republic is indebted for a third of its territory, including the ground on which we stand; from the land which has taught us that the most scholarly devotion to the languages and learning of the cloistered past is compatible with leadership in the practical application of modern science to the arts of life; from the island whose language and literature have found a new field and a vigorous growth in this region; from the last ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb

... in so furious and so harsh a voice that the servant stopped suddenly in her sweeping, and looked him full in the face. An infinite tenderness, an immense desolation passed over the face of the old maid cloistered in his service. And tears filled her eyes and she hurried ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola

... didn't mend their ways, made them fly to their lucky charms to ward off ill-luck, when she offered them a yellow flower, with great pomp, or some broken glass in a jewel-box. Then she talked to the Three Graces, those big girls who always astonished her with their cloistered existence—Nunkie before everything—and who amused themselves by measuring one another round the biceps, round the chest, or else, with their elbows on the table, played at who should first bend back the other's wrist. Lily sat down for a moment with them, then stopped, breathless ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne

... happy in these retreats, especially with the Carmelites, adopting the hair shirt and submitting to the severest discipline; but now, on coming forth from the most rigid cloistered life, she found herself in the midst of a gay world. This Chapter of Canonesses, which ought to have inculcated the mystic life, was one of those hybrid institutions not altogether white nor quite black, a cross between profane piety and pious ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans

... Villeneuve has built itself a rough faubourg; the 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 nuns were passing ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James

... my dear, my dear!" she whispered, with a terrible cloistered sweetness—whispered ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis

... ancient unsophisticated days Women were valued for their cloistered ways. And won at Rome encouragement from man Only because they stayed at home and span; While PERICLES in Attic Greek expressed The view that those least talked about were best. There were exceptions, but the normal Greek Regarded ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 8, 1914 • Various

... long years round. Her ears, attuned to every woodland sound, 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, and ...
— Gawayne And The Green Knight - A Fairy Tale • Charlton Miner Lewis

... a beautiful green valley dotted with chalets, a cozy little domain hidden away from the busy world in a cloistered nook among giant precipices topped with snowy peaks that seemed to float like islands above the curling surf of the sea of vapor that severed them from the lower world. Down from vague and vaporous heights, little ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... 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 ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen

... days when the designs were more distinct than now, it must have been a very effective way for a monk to read Bible history, to see its personages and events thus passing visibly beside him in his morning and evening walks. Beneath the frescos on one side of the cloistered walk, and along the low stone parapet that separates it from the grass-plat on the other, are inscriptions to the memory of the dead who are buried underneath the pavement. The most of these were modern, and recorded the names of persons of no particular note. Other ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... the woods had wandered in and were twining themselves around the whirring spindles, as I repeated it, verse after verse. Better still, they drew me out, in fancy, to their own forest-haunts under "cloistered boughs," where each swinging "floral bell" was ringing "a call to prayer," and making ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom

... most of the objects of interest are concentrated in one spot—a large square some ten minutes' walk from our hotel. The streets we passed through on our way thither were very quaint, the overhanging shops and cloistered pavements reminding us much of Chester. On the way we visited San Stefano di Cavalier, the church of the Knights of the Order of St. Stephen, and were much interested in the number of flags—Turkish trophies captured from the Moslem by the valiant Knights Crusaders. There were also some beautiful ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux

... guest to the door and stood alone there watching until the sound of steps and the click of the gate gave place to silence. The builders had gone away for their dinner-hour, and the close-shaven grass in the sunshine near the high hedge seemed so cloistered—so much more remote than it really was. Before those new houses came, you need not see anything beyond the privet hedge unless you wished—— But now the outside was close upon her. It was time to give ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose

... she appeared to delight in the cloistered, easy-going life of Lichfield. The quaint and beautiful old town fell short in nothing of her expectations, in spite of the fact that she had previously read John Charteris's tales of Lichfield,—"those effusions which" (if the Lichfield Courier-Herald is to ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell

... probable and natural that, in such a country, the disciples of any new spiritual doctrine should bring it to closer trial than was possible among the illiterate warriors, or in the storm-vexed solitudes of the North; yet it is a thoughtless error to deduce the subsequent power of cloistered fraternity from the lonely passions of Egyptian monachism. The anchorites of the first three centuries vanish like feverish spectres, when the rational, merciful, and laborious laws of Christian societies are established; and the clearly recognizable ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin

... the rosy-gilled 'athletico-aesthete'; and 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

... Paris,—less than an hour by train,—the country round about our camp seemed to be quite cut off from the rest of the world. With the exception of our Sunday afternoons of leave, when we joined the boulevardiers in town, we lived a life as remote and cloistered as that of some brotherhood of monks in an inaccessible monastery. That is how it appeared to me, although here again I am in danger of making it seem that my own impressions were those of all the others. This of ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall

... 'I think that art and a monastic life wed well together, and I would willingly retire to some cloistered garden afar from the world if I might carry my box of colours with me, and might sometimes see as in a vision a face like thine to paint from.' Then was I seized with a foolish timidity so that I could in no wise answer—nay, nor so much as lift up my head—but my heart said, ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney

... alone, is the asceticism to which Browning summons his disciple; it is the asceticism of energy not that of atrophy; it does not starve the senses, but reinforces the spirit; it results not in a cloistered but a militant virtue. A certain self-denial it may demand, but the self-denial becomes the condition of a higher joy. And if life with its trials frays the flesh, what matters it when the light of the spirit shines through ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden

... softness that made me, being then of a very sensual disposition, think instantly of old wine and ripe fruit, and darkened alcoves, and the wayward complaining of lutes. Indeed, wherever Monna Vittoria went she seemed to carry with her an atmosphere of subtle seclusion, of a cloistered lusciousness, of dim, green, guarded gardens, where the sighs of love's novices are stifled by the drip of stealthy fountains and the babble of fantastic birds. I suppose it was no more than my fancy, or a trick of my memory confusing ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy

... Malcolm Stewart, who had learnt to believe it mere dishonour and tameness to forgive the son for his father's deeds. A cloistered priest could hardly do so: pardon to a hostile family came only with the last mortal throe; and here was this warlike king forgiving as ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge

... first. Taking shape and body, as it were, from the experience of the moment, there rose into sight the new soul developed in her by this tragic year. Not for her—not for Juliet Sparling's daughter—the plea of cloistered innocence! By a sharp transition her youth had passed from the Chamber of Maiden Thought into the darkened Chamber of Experience. She had steeped her heart in the waters of sin and suffering; she put from her in an instant the mere maiden panic ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... legitimate demands of civilization—to find first our national duty and then our national interest, which it is also a duty for our statesmen to protect. On such a subject we have a right to look to our colleges for the help they should be so well equipped to give. From these still regions of cloistered thought may well come the white light of pure reason, not the wild, whirling words of the special pleader or of the partizan, giving loose rein to his hasty first impressions. It would be an ill day for some colleges if crude and ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid

... was once done simply, intuitively, and from the urgency of poetic feeling. A great difference must naturally exist not only in the outward mode but in the spirit of a group of modern artists who set to work to illuminate a sacred text, and that in which the task was undertaken by cloistered monks in whose gray lives a longing for beauty, for color, found expression only here. Thus one realizes that the decorative borders—which one looks at over and over again in this volume, and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various

... hive of industry, and tongues kept pace with fingers. The hospital was a world, like the Street. The nurses had come from many places, and, like cloistered nuns, seemed to have left the other world behind. A new President of the country was less real than a new interne. The country might wash its soiled linen in public; what was that compared with enough ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... are cloistered and do not open their doors to visitors, but on this day they welcomed the Prince with an eagerness that was altogether delightful. They showed him through their serene yet bare reception rooms, and with pride placed before him the skull of Montcalm, which they keep in their recreation room, ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton

... man of medium size, whose very erect carriage enhanced his height and invested him with a commanding air; while the unusual breadth of his chest and shoulders seemed to indicate that life had called him to athletic out-door pursuits, rather than the dun and dusty atmosphere of a sedentary, cloistered career. ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson

... was long for sleeplessness and care. Weary I was and many my thoughts were. I rose and walked awhile in my own place, Then midst the harem's cloistered courts did fare, Until I chanced on somewhat black and found It was a damsel shrouded in her hair. God bless her for a shining moon! Her shape A willow-wand, and pudour veiled the fair. I quaffed a cup to her; then, drawing near, I kissed the mole upon ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume IV • Anonymous

... of the Pandrethan temple — of the cloistered recesses, porch pediments, and niches of Marttand itself — were all just double their respective widths. This agreement in the relative proportions of my restored roof of Marttand with those deduced from other examples, is a presumptive proof of the correctness ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight

... way—if 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 Practical Values of Space Exploration • Committee on Science and Astronautics

... tolerant transition to a yet broader future. Had Kentucky been peopled by her same people several generations earlier, the land would have run red with the blood of religious persecutions, as never were England and Scotland at their worst. So that this lad, brought in from his solemn, cloistered fields and introduced to wrangling, sarcastic, envious creeds, had already begun to feel doubtful and distressed, not knowing what to believe nor whom to follow. He had commenced by being so plastic a medium for faith, that he ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen

... illusion of it—the universal quest. If chemists have identified substances that have fallen in Europe as sand from African deserts, swept up in African whirlwinds, that's assuasive to all the irritations that occur to those cloistered minds that must repose in the concept of a snug, isolated, little world, free from contact with cosmic wickednesses, safe from stellar guile, undisturbed by inter-planetary prowlings and invasions. The only trouble is that a chemist's ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort

... all are dervishes, cloistered or lay; those whose faith is so great that God has given them miraculous powers—and there are many—are wal[i]s; begging friars are fakirs. All forms of life—solitary, monastic, secular, celibate, married, wandering, stationary, ascetic, free—are ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various

... 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 ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad

... him speedy mastery over these torturing reflections. What opportunities lay before him of proving his prowess! Even while Katharina was telling her story, the brave and strenuous youth had set himself the problem of rescuing the cloistered sisters. The greater the danger its solution might involve him in, the more impossible it seemed at first sight, the more gladly, in his present mood, would he undertake it. He stepped out into the road and closed the door behind him with ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... life. She knew no other men. He was the only one. In a flash of shame it came over her that a woman with more experience would never have written such a letter. Everybody knew that men forget, change, easily replace first loves. Nobody but such a cloistered, academic spinster as she would have trusted a seven years' promise. This was another result of such lives as they led—such helpless, provincial women. Her resentment grew against the place. It had made her ...
— A Reversion To Type • Josephine Daskam

... church tower is!' said Anne, turning round to look at it; 'and the gable ends of your house, and the tall trees of the garden, with the cloistered alms-houses, have still quite a ...
— Abbeychurch - or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit • Charlotte M. Yonge

... 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 ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... they had left this cloistered garden and threaded their way indoors, Stephen had lost his bearings completely. He was convinced that, once in, he should never find the clue which would guide him out again as he had come. There was another ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... 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 ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray

... tinman for a while, I put on rubber shoes and slunk up to the ridgepole, the very watershed of my sixty-foot kingdom, my legs slanting into the infinities of the North and South. It sounds unexciting when written, but there I was, astride my house, up among the vents and exhausts of my former cloistered life, my head outspinning the weathercock. My Matterhorn had been climbed, "the pikes of darkness named and stormed." Next winter when I sit below snug by the fire and hear the wind funneling down ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks

... doth go straight & even, But, Cromwell, this same ployding fits not thee: Thy mind is altogether set on travel, And not to live thus cloistered like a Nun. It is not this same trash that i regard, Experience is the jewel ...
— Cromwell • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]

... Christine de Pisan, noble and 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 measures and affected language, these verses expressed the thoughts of the ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France

... took Stephen Arnold to Crooked lane is hardly ours to examine. It must have been strong, since going up to Mrs. Sand involved certain concessions, doubtless intrinsically trifling, but of exaggerated discomfort to the mind spiritually cloistered, whatever its other latitude. Among them was a distinctly necessary apology, difficult enough to make to a lady of rank so superior and authority so voyant in the Church Militant, by a mere fighting ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan

... the paper cuffs, which finished the tailor-made portion of Mr. Ollerenshaw, still linger in sporadic profusion. His low, flat-topped hat was faintly green, as though a delicate fungoid growth were just budding on its black. His small feet were cloistered in small, thick boots of glittering brilliance. The colour of his face matched that of his suit. He had no moustache and no whiskers, but a small, stiff grey beard was rooted somewhere under his chin. He had ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett

... great injustice to this mystical aspiration of the Psalmist, if we degrade it to be the mere expression of a desire for unbroken residence in a material Temple. He was no sickly, sentimental seeker after cloistered seclusion. He knew the necessities and duties of life far better than in a cowardly way to wish to shirk them, in order that he might loiter in the temple, idle under the pretence of worship. Nor would the saying fit into the facts of the case if we gave it that low meaning, for no person had ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... our time can express the melancholy essence, the pale perfume of the ancient translations of the Golden Legend of Voragine, how bind in one bright posy the plaintive flowers, which the monks cultivated in their cloistered enclosures, when hagiography was the sister of the barbaric and delightful art of the illuminators and glass stainers, of the ardent and chaste ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans

... then, she would renounce Her heritage; yes, place our ancient crown On brows it may become. A veil more suits This feminine brain; in Huelgas' cloistered shades I'll ...
— Count Alarcos - A Tragedy • Benjamin Disraeli

... he had built for his first holding in the wilderness thus grew into a cloistered school for me. It has vanished from the spot where it stood, but I shall forever see it between ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood

... 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 ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford

... stage I was timid, but I never had this trac. I used to turn as red as a poppy when I happened to meet the eye of some spectator. I was ashamed of talking so loud before so many silent people. That was the effect of my cloistered life, but I had no feeling of fear. The first time I ever had the real sensation of trac or stage fright was in the month of January 1869, at the seventh or perhaps the eighth performance of Le Passant. The success of ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt

... 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 gladly to bed. No other town, I believe, ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola

... only sage, nor the sight of him the only lesson to be learned in this wonderful suburb. It is the region and the realm of philosophy. Colleges were the inventions of many centuries later; and they imply a sort of cloistered life, or at least a life of rule, scarcely natural to an Athenian. It was the boast of the philosophic statesman of Athens, that his countrymen achieved by the mere force of nature and the love of the noble and the great, what other people aimed at by laborious ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various

... auspicious occasion, ushering, as it does, into the placid currents of my existence what at once shall be a new pleasure and a new duty. Nightly when the toils of the hour are done and darkness has drawn her curtains about the world I, seated in the cloistered seclusion of my rooms, shall enter herein a more or less complete summary of the principal events of the day that ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb

... culture pale My cloistered flesh began to fail; They bore me where the deserts quail To winds ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various

... But, notwithstanding the cloistered retirement to which he had condemned himself, his wound remained open. Instead of solitude having a healing effect, it seemed to make his sufferings greater. When, in the evening, as he sat moodily at his window, he would hear Claudet whistle to ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... visit a friend with whom he could converse, but he usually preferred a sympathetic listener, to whom he could pour out his plans and his innermost longings. Otherwise his life was as solitary as it was cloistered. He confined himself to his room for days at a time, working fiercely at the manuscript of the play, Cromwell, which he ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd

... that appealed to him—charm; and the quieter it was, the more he liked it. And this one had charm, shadowy as afternoon sunlight on those Italian hills and valleys he had loved. The feeling, too, that she was, as it were, apart, cloistered, made her seem nearer to himself, a strangely desirable companion. When a man is very old and quite out of the running, he loves to feel secure from the rivalries of youth, for he would still be first in ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... 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 interest in the stirring facts ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon

... amorous course To cloistered sweet in thickets found; The leaves obey its tender force, And stir 'twixt silence ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year - Edited by Katherine D. Blake and Georgia Alexander • Various

... ordination of a deaconess were precisely the same as those used for a deacon. The deaconesses were not cloistered: they lived at home with children or relatives. But they wore a distinctive dress, and had their place in the church with the clergy. The "golden age" of the order is said to have been immediately following ...
— Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly, "Jenny June" • Various

... acute, is life-long, and thus it differs from the other elegies. Moreover, it celebrates a noble object, and thus is unlike the ambiguous affection, real or dramatic, which informs the sonnets of Shakespeare. So the poem stands alone, cloistered; not fiery with indignation, not breaking into actual prophecy, like Shelley's Adonais; not capable, by reason even of its meditative metre, of the organ music of Lycidas. Yet it is not to be reckoned inferior to these because its aim and ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang

... 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 may be inferred, from the curious ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)

... 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 ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox

... 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 monks are indolent: ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot

... 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 ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... that one lady, and she a foreigner, could not change the customs of centuries, and that innovations were dangerous. I also tried to fire with the same zeal for reformation the Abbess of Bellaise, who was a young and spirited woman, open to conviction; but she was cloistered, and could not go to investigate matters as I did, with the Abbe for my escort, and often with my son. He was enchanted to present any little gift, and it was delightful that the peasants should learn to connect all benefits with Monsieur le Marquis, ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge

... pictures, particularly those of earlier date than any Spanish picture reproduced here, we feel the strong impress of the Church. In the picture by Alonso Cano there looks out from the eyes of the Mother the sentiment of the cloistered nun; and though, with the Murillos, we catch a glimpse of Spain outside of the Church, even with him there is a sense of subjection from which the memories of the Inquisition are ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell

... joy on his happy children, so surely the divine Father must have smiled upon us. In the depths of my heart I respected a faith that was so simple, genuine, and full of sunshine. Truly, it had come from heaven, and not from the dyspeptic creeds of cloistered theologians. ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe

... was as well something so gentle and sweet and primitive about its natural clearings and open glades, about the spring that bubbled up from under a tilted rock just below the summit, about the grassy terraces, its hidden ledges, its scattered, low-branching, moss-covered maples, the cloistered character of its clumps of small beeches, its domestic looking mountain ash, its orchard-like wild black cherries, its garden- like plots of huckleberries, raspberries, and strawberries, the patches of fragrant brakes like dense miniature forests through which one wades as through ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs

... must remain its own sole expression; and those whose sad fortune it may be never to behold it have no better resource than to dream about gray, weather-stained, ivy-grown edifices, wrought with quaint Gothic ornament, and standing around grassy quadrangles, where cloistered walks have echoed to the quiet footsteps of twenty generations,—lawns and gardens of luxurious repose, shadowed with canopies of foliage, and lit up with sunny glimpses through archways of great boughs,—spires, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various

... island. One can imagine the amiable recluse composing his homely romance amid such surroundings. Perhaps it was the one labour of his life. He may have come to the Inn originally with the aspiration of making fame and money; and then the spirit of cloistered calm turned him from such vulgar paths, and instead of losing his fine feelings and swelling the ranks of the plutocrats, he gave us a charming romance for our fireside. With the literary men of ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock

... for love comes not to a man as to a woman, but rather with the sound of trumpets and the glare of white light. The cloistered peace that fills her soul rests seldom upon him, and instead he is stirred with high ambition and spurred on to glorious achievement. For to her, love is the end of life; to him ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed

... she has quite forgotten. Here I send you a little set of rhymes; my picture of Blondel and this old story brought them into my mind. They are gazes, as the drunk painter says in "Gerfaut;" they are veiled, a mystery. I know she's not in a castle or a tower or a cloistered cell anywhere; she is in Park Lane. Don't I read it in the "Morning Post?" But I can't, I won't, go and sing at the area- gate, you know. Try if F. B. will put the rhymes into the paper. Do they take it in in Park Lane? See whether you can get me a guinea for these tears of mine: "Mes Larmes," ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang

... inmates 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 ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence

... life his mind was fixed on the contemplation of divine truths, thus breathing into all his actions a heavenly influence. He attained in society and in human relationships a degree of perfection not surpassed, if equalled, by the martyr's death, the contemplative of the solitude, the cloistered ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott

... he had gone through college without ever touching "college life,"—its sports, its social diversions, its adventures. It had been for him a life in a library, in classrooms, in his own one shabby little room,—a cloistered life; in the hard work of it and the successful winning of his way he had been generally contented and happy. But he could not talk to these boys about "college life" as it appeared to them; and they ...
— The Jester of St. Timothy's • Arthur Stanwood Pier

... without reading his homily,—pass by a folio in twenty grenadier volumes to greet a little black-coated, yellow-faced duodecimo,—speak to the forlorn and forsaken, who have been doing dusty penance upon cloistered shelves in silent alcoves for a century, with none so poor to do them reverence,—read here one little catch which came from lips long ago as silent as the clod which they are kissing, and there some forgotten fragment ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various

... out very freely on everything but the Marquesas Islands, and when I left him he was in full tide of discourse on all things sacred and profane. But he seems to put away the objective side of his life, and to shut himself up in this cold north as a cloistered thinker.' ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville

... 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 ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... social experiences, my recollections are, on the whole, pleasurable, but they are somewhat remote from anything that can properly be called scholastic. They are associated with the charm of certain cloistered buildings—with Magdalen especially, and the shades of Addison's Walk; with country drives in dogcarts to places like Witney and Abingdon; with dinners there in the summer evenings, and with a sense of being happily outside the radius of caps ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock

... a dried up stick, living the cloistered life of a hard-working woman imprisoned within her daily routine, who had never had a man stick his nose into her room since the death of her husband; yet she had an obsession with double meanings and ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola

... in the peaceful work of adorning and beautifying his capital cities. At Thebes he greatly enlarged the temple of Ammon, begun by Amenemhat I., and continued under his son, the first Usurtasen, by adding to it the cloistered court in front of the central cell—a court two hundred and forty feet long by sixty-two broad, surrounded by a colonnade, of which the supports were Osirid pillars, or square piers with a statue of Osiris in front. This is the first known example of the cloistered court, ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson

... across the passage of a black-haired and a sturdy, boyish little figure in a great blue apron, perched on a stool before an easel, and on the other hand, Carmen had often been conscious of the fumes of a tobacco pipe penetrating her cloistered seclusion, and had seen across the passage, vaguely enveloped in the same nicotine cloud, an American Olympian, in a rocking chair, with his feet on the mantel shelf. They had once or twice met on the staircase, on which occasion ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte

... 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 ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... 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 the leaded window-panes at the gaunt, leafless trees, on whose summits ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley

... of modern ladies laughing and chatting at tea in the cloistered recesses of the terrace garden struck a note as sharply incongruous as a flock of ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees

... Now the rainbow humbugs[3] soar. Glittering all with golden hues Such as haunt the dreams of Jews;— Some reflecting mines that lie Under Chili's glowing sky, Some, those virgin pearls that sleep Cloistered in the southern deep; Others, as if lent a ray From the streaming Milky Way, Glistening o'er with curds and whey ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al

... see, madam, beauty will be beauty in any habit; Though, I confess, the splendour of a court Were a much fitter scene for yours, than is A cloistered privacy. ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden

... autumn of belated happiness; he saw again the dead woman and the living child. He recalled his vow that the girl Heaven had given him should live apart from the world, sequestered in the holy solitude of the hills, cloistered in the pine woods. Year by year he seemed to see again the growth of the girl's life, the patient care, the mutual love—saw at the last the fairest flower of Sicilian maidenhood, Perpetua. All these memories belonged to the reign of the good king Robert, the days when the executioner's ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy

... ever, and liquid voices were heard to hiss scornfully that the Republic, which proclaimed respect for all religions and rights, was a lie, for its first thought was to trample on the national religion, and to dispossess an inoffensive corporation of cloistered ladies of their right to then property. Here the first ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea

... influenced church architecture in Italy down to the eleventh century, and such buildings as the beautiful church (Fig. 155) of San Miniato, near Florence (A.D. 1013), and the renowned group of Cathedral, Baptistery, Campanile, and Campo Santo (a kind of cloistered cemetery) at Pisa, bear a very strong resemblance in many respects to these originals; though they belong rather to the Romanesque than to the Basilican division of ...
— Architecture - Classic and Early Christian • Thomas Roger Smith

... shines out with a light which none can mistake. And whether the average man accepts or rejects the standards therein embodied, lovers of poetry will recognise that the Nawab, in his championship of a high and noble ideal, fights in the same army as Dante and Michelangelo,—neither of them cloistered dreamers, neither of them arm-chair theorists, but men who lived and loved and suffered amidst the turmoil of a world they viewed with ...
— Sonnets • Nizam-ud-din-Ahmad, (Nawab Nizamat Jung Bahadur)

... practice above their precepts. Theirs, too, was the school of the "Naturalists." Ludovico is particularly praised for his solemnity of hue, most suited to his religious subjects—"that sober twilight, the air of cloistered meditation, which you have so often heard recommended as the proper tone of historic colour." If the recommendation has at our Academy been often heard, it has entirely lost its influence; our ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various

... few days later by chance in an old cloistered, deserted garden. How often she had walked in that garden as she was doing now with English friends! His presence gave the place its true significance. They met as those who have between them the bond of ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley

... 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

... no taper lit in cloistered cage, Its glimmer borrowed from the grove or porch; He read the record of the planet's page By Etna's glare and ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... delighted at the prospect of his short visit, and to-morrow he and I will have some small climb. I shall send the car, with Young Nick to drive all who care to go, to a few of the beauty spots, while I am otherwise occupied. They must penetrate the cloistered charms of exquisite Borrodaile, and of course see Lodore, which ought to be at its best now, as there have been heavy rains. Jove! How the Cumberland names ring on the ear, like the "horns of elfland"! Helvelyn; ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson

... civil list. She was one of the first Queens in Europe, had the first establishment in Europe, and was obliged to keep up the most refined and luxurious Court in Europe; and all upon means no greater than had been assigned to many of the former bigoted Queens, who led a cloistered life, retired from the world without circulating their wealth among the nation which supplied them with so large a revenue; and yet who lived and died uncensured for hoarding from the nation what ought at least to have been in ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 4 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe

... poor child, you are turning marriage into poetry. But if, from time immemorial, girls have been cloistered in the bosom of their families, if God, if social laws put them under the stern yoke of parental sanction, it is, mark my words, to spare them the misfortunes that this very poetry which charms and dazzles you, and which ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac

... generations, to understand the publicity, the communal quality of life in the region of the Mediterranean. The first thought when one gets up is to go out of doors to see what people are talking of, the last thing before going to bed is to chat with the neighbors about the events of the day. The home, cloistered off, exclusive, can hardly be said to exist. Instead of the nordic hearth there is the courtyard about which the women sit while the men are away at the marketplace. In Spain this social life centers in the cafe and the ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos

... Occasionally there were 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 the ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner

... they went, and soon were lost to view Within the gateway of a rocky cliff; Sometimes came glimpses of them as they climbed The sloping passages within the cliff— A cloistered corridor of carven columns— And paused a moment at some rocky window To see the grandeur of the mountain heights. The soft notes of a trumpet called them up, And silver bells were ...
— Parsifal - A Drama by Wagner • Retold by Oliver Huckel

... yield him strict obedience in that which he enjoined upon them. He desired anxiously that the three children born to him in the East, during his first crusade, John Tristan, Peter, and Blanche, and even Isabel, his eldest daughter, should enter upon the cloistered life, which he looked upon as the safest for their salvation. He exhorted them thereto, especially his daughter Isabel, many and many a time, in letters equally tender and pious; but, as they testified no taste for it, he made no attempt to force their inclinations, and concerned himself ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... had made a man's presence natural to her, Una needed a man, the excitation of his touch, the solace of his voice. She could not patiently endure a cloistered vacuousness. ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis

... entirely paved with pebbles. Here I found the cook, who, I had been told, was the only person in authority at that time. Surrounded by four great walls, on which hung utensils that were rarely handled except for the periodical scouring, she looked as solemn as a cloistered nun. She consented, however, to show me the interior of the castle, with a pathetic readiness which said that the appearance of an occasional visitor kept her from sinking ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker

... there no ancient, sceptred Wrong? No torturing Power, endured too long? Yea; and for these our hatred shall Be cloistered ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps

... 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

... from infancy, by his parents, to the ecclesiastical profession. He had been taught to read in Latin; he had been trained to keep his eyes on the ground and to speak low. While still a child, his father had cloistered him in the college of Torchi in the University. There it was that he had grown up, on the ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo

... mixed 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 Rosalind or Marivaux's Sylvia or Richardson's Clarissa—this humanity ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis

... never forget the visit Shakspere and myself paid to the cloistered, columned, pinnacled ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce

... shades of 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 ...
— Sagittulae, Random Verses • E. W. Bowling

... about it! So, on the whole, I hope we've done well to house ourselves as we have. And we can give a comfortable bedroom to a friend! My dear Marny—you must come and see me! It's really a quaint old town—with a rather foreign-looking cloistered "Place"—and a curious Saturday Market—with such nice red ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden

... 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 wizardry, had ...
— The Earthly Paradise - A Poem • William Morris



Words linked to "Cloistered" :   unworldly, private



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