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Cloister   Listen
noun
Cloister  n.  
1.
An inclosed place. (Obs.)
2.
A covered passage or ambulatory on one side of a court; (pl.) The series of such passages on the different sides of any court, esp. that of a monastery or a college. "But let my due feet never fail To walk the studious cloister's pale."
3.
A monastic establishment; a place for retirement from the world for religious duties. "Fitter for a cloister than a crown."
Cloister garth (Arch.), the garden or open part of a court inclosed by the cloisters.
Synonyms: Cloister, Monastery, Nunnery, Convent, Abbey, Priory. Cloister and convent are generic terms, and denote a place of seclusion from the world for persons who devote their lives to religious purposes. They differ is that the distinctive idea of cloister is that of seclusion from the world, that of convent, community of living. Both terms denote houses for recluses of either sex. A cloister or convent for monks is called a monastery; for nuns, a nunnery. An abbey is a convent or monastic institution governed by an abbot or an abbess; a priory is one governed by a prior or a prioress, and is usually affiliated to an abbey.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Cloister" Quotes from Famous Books



... go to my end with a clean heart, for if I have sinned it is against custom and not against God. I broke the vows indeed, but I was forced to take those vows, and, therefore, they did not bind. I was a woman born for light and love, and yet I was thrust into the darkness of this cloister, there to wither dead in life. And so I broke the vows, and I am glad that I have broken them, though it has brought me to this. If I was deceived and my marriage is no marriage before the law as they tell me now, ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard

... gateway, the spectator sees, on his right, a long line of buildings, of the age of the original foundation, for the use of the brethren, each of whom has a house and garden to himself. On the left is an ambulatory, or cloister, 135 feet in length, and extending to the church on the south-east. Above the ambulatory is the ancient infirmary, and chambers called the Nuns's rooms, from their having been allotted to three hospital sisters on the foundation of Cardinal Beaufort. The ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 569 - Volume XX., No. 569. Saturday, October 6, 1832 • Various

... on each pleasant footstep stay, We opportunely may relate The progress of this house's fate. A nunnery first gave it birth, (For virgin buildings oft brought forth) And all that neighbour-ruin shows The quarries whence this dwelling rose. Near to this gloomy cloister's gates, There dwelt the blooming virgin Thwaites, Fair beyond measure, and an heir, Which might deformity make fair; And oft she spent the summer's suns Discoursing with the subtle Nuns, Whence, in these words, one to her weav'd, As 'twere ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell

... large embrace He folds the enchanted hill; then like a god Strides into heaven behind the purple peak. Oh beautiful! In the clear, rayless air, I see the chequered vale mapped far below, The sky-paved streams, the velvet pasture-slopes, The grim, gray cloister whose deep vesper bell Blends at this height with tinkling, homebound herds! I see—but oh, how far!—the blessed town Where Liebhaid dwells. Oh that I were yon star That pricks the West's unbroken foil of gold, Bright as an eye, ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus

... the squared and carved beams were brought from the San Francisco Mountains, more than a hundred miles away, under the direction of the priests, and that they were carved and finished prior to transportation. They were intended for the chapel and cloister, but the latter building was never finished. The roof timbers were finally distributed among the people of Shumopavi and Shupaulovi. At Shumopavi one of the kivas, known, as the Nuvwatikyuobi (The-high-place-of-snow—San Francisco Mountains) kiva, was built only 8 years ago. The ...
— Eighth Annual Report • Various

... As run wild deer before the chasing hounds, Before Rolland the Pagans flee.—"Well done!" The Archbishop cries, "Such valor a true Knight Should have, when mounted, armed, on his good steed! Else, not four deniers is he worth: a monk In cloister should he be, and spend his life In praying for our sins!...." "Strike," said Rolland, "No quarter!"—At the word the French renew The combat ... yet the Christian loss was ...
— La Chanson de Roland • Lon Gautier

... disciplinarian, destitute of any of the softness to which the lad had been accustomed, and disposed to rule all under his control with a rod of iron. He kept his youthful captive strictly immured in the cloister, where he had to endure the severest discipline, while being educated in Latin and the ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris

... II, a Frenchman from Reims, who had been educated at the same famous cloister of Cluny which had trained Gregory VII, thought that the time had come for action. The general state of Europe was far from satisfactory. The primitive agricultural methods of that day (unchanged since Roman times) caused a constant scarcity of food. There was unemployment ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon

... who dares not mingle his soul with the gross world; he has failed for lack of a robust faith, a strenuous courage. But his failure is beautiful and pathetic, and for a time at least his Virgin, Babe, and Saint will smile from the cloister wall with their "cold, calm, beautiful regard." And yet to have done otherwise to have been other than this; to have striven like that youth—the Urbinate—men praise so! More remarkable, as the summary of a civilisation, than My Last ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden

... Robert to draw nigher, And with a gesture bade the rest retire; And when they were alone, the Angel said, "Art thou the King?" Then bowing down his head, King Robert crossed both hands upon his breast, And meekly answered him: "Thou knowest best! My sins as scarlet are; let me go hence, And in some cloister's school of penitence, Across those stones, that pave the way to heaven, Walk barefoot, till my guilty soul is shriven!" The Angel smiled, and from his radiant face A holy light illumined all the place, And through the open window, loud and clear, ...
— Tales of a Wayside Inn • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... noble gateway, which, somehow or other, does not look as old as we know it to be, we enter the great quadrangle, around which the various buildings are grouped. On the eastern side is the Infirmary, with the Ambulatory beneath it, a long, low cloister of sixteenth-century date, which extends along the whole side to the church. In one of the rooms above, a window opens into the church, where there may once have been a gallery to enable the infirm ...
— Winchester • Sidney Heath

... wall dividing it from a great cloistered court, having a terrace all round, set with pillars, communicating with which were the chambers of the king and queen, all curiously wrought, carved, gilded, and painted with the utmost splendour and magnificence. From this cloister, a covered gallery, six paces wide, extended a great length all the way to the lake; and on each side of this gallery there were ten courts, answering to each other like cloisters, each having fifty chambers with their gardens, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr

... wall," he had said in those hours of confidence; "and, to be as sublime a blockhead, if you'll allow me the word, you, my dear fellow, have kept sounding the charge. We've sat prating here of 'success,' heaven help us, like chanting monks in a cloister, hugging the sweet delusion that it lies somewhere in the work itself, in the expression, as you said, of one's subject or the intensification, as somebody else somewhere says, of one's note. One has been going on in ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James

... fallen Ceaseless, constant, to her lot, But, like cloister honors falling, Unto one who sought them not; Daughter meek of the great Foundress Of thy honored house and name, Worthy art thou to be Abbess Of the nuns ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon

... vocation, and strove to combat by forcible arguments the cold and disdainful demeanour exhibited by her daughter when mixing in gay society, the fair girl persevered from the age of thirteen to seventeen in her longing to embrace the life of the cloister. Futile for a time were the parental arguments, unfruitful every effort! Anne Genevieve would not consort with worldlings, persisted in her distaste for mundane pleasures, and continued to cherish persistently her desire for conventual seclusion. At length the princess, ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies

... were desirous of giving her every advantage for securing the highest attainments. The education of young ladies, at that time, in France, was conducted almost exclusively by nuns in convents. The idea of the silence and solitude of the cloister inspired the highly-imaginative girl with a blaze of enthusiasm. Fondly as she loved her home, she was impatient for the hour to arrive when, with heroic self-sacrifice, she could withdraw from the world ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott

... Addison was abroad, and after he came home in rather a dismal way to wait upon Providence in his shabby lodging in the Haymarket, young Captain Steele was cutting a much smarter figure than that of his classical friend of Charterhouse Cloister and Maudlin Walk. Could not some painter give an interview between the gallant captain of Lucas's, with his hat cocked, and his lace, and his face too, a trifle tarnished with drink, and that poet, that philosopher, ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray

... empty niche; (3) niched figure of Virgin and Child; and on the back (1) name of the last abbot, Dovell; (2) crucifix flanked by two empty niches. Crossing a rough field, the visitor enters the monastery proper by a doorway pierced in the cloister wall. (Admission 1s. for one, 6d. for each additional person.) The entrance opens at once into the quadrangle. Immediately on the L. are the W. cloisters (Perp.), once surmounted by the sleeping apartments of the ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade

... Temple, but many a long day was destined to go by ere Miriam reached them. The entrance by which they were told they must approach if they sought speech of the high priest, was one of the two Huldah Gates on the south side of the Royal Cloister, and thither they came across the valley of Tyropaeon. As they drew near to them of a sudden that gate which stood most to the east was flung wide, and out of it issued a thousand or more of armed men, like ants from a broken nest, who, shouting and waving swords, rushed towards ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard

... characteristic of our great national poet that is rather unobtrusive than obscure. I mean a singular unworldliness of thought and feeling; a cherished idealism; an inborn magnanimity. Not the unworldliness of the study and the cloister, or the other-worldliness of such poets as Dante and Milton, but the unworldliness of a man of the world, the idealism that is closely allied with humour. And it is in this union and not elsewhere that the "breadth" of Shakespeare, of which we hear so much, is found. ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various

... paper away. We lose to learn value. We shall know better next time. We have to sample our cargo, and we waste most of it, but we shall be refound for the next voayge. Bless God for an open-air penitence, but let us have no foul air of the cloister to turn repentance sour. So big a thing as the soul can afford to forgive so small a thing ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray

... love of pageantry, I think that as in Burma it has not invaded the sphere of religion and ethics more than the Pitakas themselves allow. In art and literature its influence has been considerable. The story of the Ramayana is illustrated on the cloister walls of the royal temple at Bangkok and Indian mythology has supplied a multitude of types to the painter and sculptor; such as Yomma: rat (Yama), Phaya Man (Mara), Phra: In (Indra). These are all deities known to the Pitakas but the sculptures or ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot

... Alhambra by a Saracenic cloister, from the ceiling of which an occasional lamp threw a gleam upon some Eastern arms hung up against the wall. This passage led to the armoury, a room of moderate dimensions, but hung with rich contents. Many an inlaid breastplate, ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli

... On the cloister fixed his eye, Thro' the hours' weary round, To his maiden's lattice nigh, Till he heard that lattice sound— Till that dearest form was seen— Till she on her lover smil'd— And the turret-grates between Look'd devout ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 487 - Vol. 17, No. 487. Saturday, April 30, 1831 • Various

... thoroughly impressed on the mind of Northern Europe by means of them; and the first missionaries familiarized the rude Goths and Huns with Biblical incidents at a time when reading was unknown outside of the Cloister. No change in German drama occurred until the seventeenth century, when operas after the Italian superseded the Mysteries and Moralities. The production of this age, however, were characterized by bad taste and pedantry; and it was not until Goethe ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis

... heaven be on this earth or any ease for the soul, it is in cloister or school. For in cloister no man cometh to chide or fight, and in school there is lowliness and love and ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck

... Transept, a few yards south of which may be observed a range of Early English arches, each containing a double arch, which is again subdivided, but all have been long blocked up; this was a portion of what was called the "Dark Cloister." To the eastward of these is another range of arches with piers about twelve feet in height, some of which are comparatively perfect; these piers are alternately cylindrical and octagonal, the octagonal columns presenting alternately a side or ...
— Ely Cathedral • Anonymous

... sincere to himself, to the aspect under which human things came to him, to the precise names of precise things. He had a sensitiveness in his soul which perhaps matched the deftness of his fingers, in their adroit, forbidden trade: his soul bent easily from his mother praying in the cloister to the fat Margot drinking in the tavern; he could dream exquisitely over the dead ladies who had once been young, and who had gone like last year's snow, and then turn to the account-book of his satirical malice against ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons

... struck midnight, and there was a foot-fall in the cloister. I was startled by it out of an entire forgetfulness of all around me, for I was lying on my bed in the monastery cell, with my hands clasped over my eyes, as I had thrown myself down on coming in; and, with a strange contrariety, my mind, broken ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various

... nun, to be a nun!" he repeated. "You do not know, my child, the life, the misery, which is hidden behind the walls of the convent. You do not know it! I prefer a thousand times to see you unhappy in the world than to see you unhappy in the cloister. Here your complaints can be heard, there you will have only the walls. You are beautiful, very beautiful, and you were not born for it, you were not born to be the bride of Christ! Believe me, my child, time will blot it all out. Later ...
— Friars and Filipinos - An Abridged Translation of Dr. Jose Rizal's Tagalog Novel, - 'Noli Me Tangere.' • Jose Rizal

... difference plainly told. Hucbald, a monk of the cloister St. Amand in Flanders, wrote "The Louis-Lay," to celebrate the victory gained by the West-Frankish King Louis III. over the Normans, in 881, near Saucourt. It is in the Old-High-German. A few lines ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... to make the other take the veil in order that her sister's fortune might be adequate to the occasion; and he regretted my having left Paris, because he intended to have set me to discover which had the greatest inclination to the world and which the chief vocation for the cloister. Annora's Protestant eyes grew large and round with horror, and she ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge

... and after that those two entirely exquisite "Garden Fancies," the first of which is devoted to the abstruse thesis that a woman may be charming, and the second to the equally abstruse thesis that a book may be a bore. Then comes "The Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister," from which the most ingenious "Browning student" cannot extract anything except that people sometimes hate each other in Spain; and then "The Laboratory," from which he could extract nothing except that people sometimes hate each other in France. This is a perfectly ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton

... undertook to touch upon the theme, it was embellished with all the wild extravagances of an oriental imagination, which afterward stole into the graver works of the monkish historians. Hence the chronicles are apt to be tinctured with those saintly miracles which savor of the pious labors of the cloister, or those fanciful fictions that betray their Arabian Authors. Scarce one of their historical facts but has been connected in the original with some romantic fiction, and even in its divorced state, ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various

... last, indicating the end of the period. Three or four boys went forward to confer with Mr. Beaver about certain vexing algebraic problems. Needless to say, neither Burton nor Harrington was among these. They drifted out into the cloister with the rest of the class, having certain problems of their own, not algebraic. One or two boys addressed Burton and were rebuffed with a curt word, which was unusual, as Burton was ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various

... service over his dear departed sister, amidst his own sobs and those of the little congregation which assembled round Helen's tomb. There were not many who cared for her, or who spoke of her when gone. Scarcely more than of a nun in a cloister did people know of that pious and gentle lady. A few words among the cottagers whom her bounty was accustomed to relieve, a little talk from house to house at Clavering, where this lady told how their neighbour died of a complaint in the heart; whilst that speculated ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray

... the spiritual life. Her words ring with a strange terseness and earnestness as she here pens her spiritual testament. She points out the mischievous foibles, the little meannesses, the spirit of cantankerousness and strife, which long experience of the cloister had shown her were the besetting sins of the conventual life. She places before them the loftier standard of the Cross. Her words, direct and simple, ring out true and clear, producing somewhat the solemn effect of a Commination Service.' Strong as that ...
— Santa Teresa - an Appreciation: with some of the best passages of the Saint's Writings • Alexander Whyte

... but think," said Vaura, her eyes suffused with tears, "that she would be happier in the bright world, loved and loving, than in the cloister." ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny

... in great men, Cardinal Ximenez de Cisneros was among the greatest. Descended from an honourable family, he entered the Church, where a career of great promise opened before him. At an early age, however, he quit the secular priesthood for the cloister and became a monk of the Franciscan Order, in which the austerity of his observance of that severe rule of life and the vigour of his intellect advanced him to the ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt

... English mostly do not. We young people were easily taken with his glittering error, and we read him with much the same fury, that he wrote. 'Never Too Late to Mend;' 'Love Me Little, Love Me Long;' 'Christie Johnstone;' 'Peg Woffington;' and then, later, 'Hard Cash,' 'The Cloister and the Hearth,' 'Foul Play,' 'Put Yourself in His Place'—how much they all meant ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... this court they walked through a kind of pillared cloister, and the facades of the house as they passed on, were beautiful in pure simplicity of line; so white, they seemed to turn the sun on them to moonlight; so jewelled with bands and plaques of lovely tiles, that they were like snowy shoulders ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... flattered is a letter from the holy sisters, the Ursuline nuns, congratulating me on my arrival. Having returned a polite answer to this letter, it was intimated to me that the saints had a desire to see me. The bishop conducted me to the cloister. We conversed at first through the grates; but presently I was admitted within, and I passed an hour with them greatly to my satisfaction. None of that calm monotony which I expected. All was gayety, wit, ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis

... appear'd, and all the gossip rout. O senseless Lycius! Madman! wherefore flout The silent-blessing fate, warm cloister'd hours, And show to common eyes these secret bowers? The herd approach'd; each guest, with busy brain, Arriving at the portal, gaz'd amain, And enter'd marveling: for they knew the street, Remember'd it from childhood all complete Without a gap, yet ne'er before ...
— Lamia • John Keats

... the snow lay white, as if a flock of swans had settled there. On the coast below were lovely green woods, and close on shore a building of some kind, the mermaid didn't know whether it was church or cloister. Citrons and orange trees grew in the garden, and before the porch were stately palm trees. The sea ran in here and formed a quiet bay, unruffled, but very deep. The little mermaid swam with the prince ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King

... valley of the Oreto from Monreale, on the slopes of the mountains just above the little village of Parco, lies the old convent of Sta. Catarina. From the cloister terrace at Monreale you can see its pale walls and the slim campanile of its chapel rising from the crowded citron and mulberry orchards that flourish, rank and wild, no longer cared for by pious and loving hands. From the rough ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various

... utterance. Had he lived two days longer, he had been sixty-five years old.—He endur'd a twelve-month's torment of the body with a calmness that confess'd a superiority of soul! He was interred in the same grave with her the most dear to him when living, in the great cloister of Westminster-Abbey; ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber

... Anomoian Arianism. He was a famous preacher, and many of his homilies, including a series of lenten lectures on the Hexaemeron, and an exposition of the psalter, have been preserved. His ascetic tendencies are exhibited in the Moralia and Regulae, ethical manuals for use in the world and the cloister respectively. His three hundred letters reveal a rich and observant nature, which, despite the troubles of ill-health and ecclesiastical unrest, remained optimistic, tender and even playful. His principal efforts ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various

... question as it was inevitable that she should; but now another was before her. Assuredly, at her age, there was no possible reason why she should cloister herself to bring up her daughter; but there was every reason for not marrying a man in whom her own faith ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton

... handsomely with Marble, covered in the middle with a rich Turkey Mat, and sheltered from the heat of the weather by a kind of Veil, expanded by Ropes from one side of the Parapet-wall, or Lattice of the Flat Roof, to the other. So into a little Cloister running round this Court, and up a little winding stone Staircase into another Cloister or Upper Gallery. Then at a Door all covered with rich Filigree-work in Gold and Colours did the Negress knock; and by and by a soft silvery Voice, of which the sound, somehow, made ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala

... it happened I cannot say, but Diard presently recognized by its architecture the portal of a convent, the gate of which was already battered in. Springing into the cloister to put a stop to the fury of the soldiers, he arrived just in time to prevent two Parisians from shooting a Virgin by Albano. In spite of the moustache with which in their military fanaticism they had decorated her face, he bought the picture. Montefiore, left alone during this ...
— Juana • Honore de Balzac

... departed whose names are enshrined in our Minster, one has sorrowfully to observe that contemporary opinion of their place in history and abiding worth was not infrequently astray; that memory has, indeed, forgotten their works; and their memorials might be removed to some cloister without loss of respect for the dead, perhaps even with the silent approval of their own day and generation could it awake from its endless sleep and review the strange and eventful course of human life since they left "this bank and shoal of time." But may it not be safely prophesied that of all ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant

... the repasts of knowledge, than, as Plautus bluntly puts it, having he wits and she wits recline at the repasts of fashion. Isolation is more likely to breed pruriency than commingling to provoke indulgence. The virtue of the cloister and the cell scarcely deserves the name. A girl has her honor in her own keeping. If she can be trusted with boys and men at the lecture-room and in church, she can be trusted with them at school and in college. Jean Paul ...
— Sex in Education - or, A Fair Chance for Girls • Edward H. Clarke

... the monastery, and to the property of the town inhabitants. Lindsay therefore wrote to the king to try to "disafforest" the lands which were contiguous to the monastery, and he effected his object by payment of 1320 marks. Of his other improvements we read that "he made in the south cloister a lavatory of marble, for the monks to wash their hands in when they went to meals—their hall being near on the other side of the wall, the door leading into it being yet standing; the lavatory continued entire until the year 1651, and ...
— The New Guide to Peterborough Cathedral • George S. Phillips

... reconciliation with the church; but I assure you, that unless you had killed him, you would never have got absolution, nor purgatory, but would have gone plump to the devil. But where is your offering to the cloister?" said he, snarling. "Here," she replied, and handed him a pretty big purse of money. "Well," said he, "I will now make your peace, and your penance is to remain a widow as long as you live, lest you should make another bad bargain." ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne

... the principal personage of this history, was overtaken by a shower of rain as he returned home from a friend's house, where he had been passing the evening. He therefore crossed, as quickly as his corpulence would allow, the deserted little square called "The Cloister," which lies directly behind the chancel of the cathedral of Saint-Gatien ...
— The Vicar of Tours • Honore de Balzac

... midst. Near the fountain were a few market stalls, with awnings over them of gay striped linen cloth, about which some people, mostly women and children, were moving quietly, looking at the goods exposed there. The ground floor of the building round the quadrangle was occupied by a wide arcade or cloister, whose fanciful but strong architecture I could not enough admire. Here also a few people were sauntering or sitting reading on ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris

... In that great cloister's stillness and seclusion, By guardian angels led, Safe from temptation, safe from sin's pollution, She lives, whom we ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin

... in 1833, after a proposition of Mr Dupont-Delporte, prefect, by the general council of the departement, was opened to the public in 1834. It occupies two of the galleries of the cloister of the ancient convent of Saint-Mary. In the first gallery are the gallic, roman and gallo-roman antiquities, as also those of the middle ages; in the second, those of the period, termed the renaissance. ...
— Rouen, It's History and Monuments - A Guide to Strangers • Theodore Licquet

... severe shower, after having been obliged to come nearly a mile on foot. As we were flattering ourselves with being admitted, the Procureur of la Trappe, who has the direction of the female convent, told us that nobody could be received there. I tried, however, to ring the bell at the gate of the cloister; a nun appeared behind the latticed opening through which the portress may speak ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein

... sitting once in a garden-close watching a curious act proceeding, which I did not quite understand. It looked like a religious ceremony; a man in embroidered robes was being conducted by some boys in white dresses through the long cloister, carrying something carefully wrapped up in his arms, and I heard what sounded like an antique hymn of a fine stiff ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson

... youth. Monks of the Middle Ages had noted its favourable situation for a religious community, and the canons-regular of the Order of St Augustine had erected there one of their priories. A portion of an extensive wall which had surrounded the cloister was retained in the Selkirk manor-house. Farther afield were other reminders of past days to stir the imagination of young Thomas Douglas. A few miles eastward from his home was Dundrennan Abbey. Up the Dee was Thrieve Castle, begun by Archibald the Grim, and later used as a stronghold ...
— The Red River Colony - A Chronicle of the Beginnings of Manitoba • Louis Aubrey Wood

... designed to supply the place of the Greek and Roman theatre, which had been banished from the Church. The plays were written and performed by the clergy. They seem to have first been employed to wile away the dulness of the cloister, but were very soon introduced to the public. Adam and Eve in Paradise, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection were theatrized. The effect could hardly be salutary. The different persons of the Trinity appeared on the stage; on one side of the scene stretched ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various

... still lived, and from the bloody scene of her husband's execution she repaired to Kiew. There would she live in the cloister of the Penitents, preserving the memory of the being she loved, and imploring the vengeance of ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach

... political life, there is room and sore need for the application of the same principles. What a different world it would be if our judges and representatives carried some tincture of Jehoshaphat's simple and devout wisdom into their duties! Civic and political life ought to be as holy as that of cloister and cell. To judge righteously, to vote honestly, is as much worship as to pray. A politician may be 'a priest of ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... England factories, the operatives were taxed for the support of religion. The Lowell Company dismissed them if often absent from church, and their lives without and within the factory were regulated as minutely as if in the cloister. Women and children were urged on by the cowhide; and the first inspection of the factories, notably in Connecticut, revealed a state of things hardly less harrowing than that which had brought about the passage of the first Factory Acts in England. At the same time wages were very inadequate. In ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell

... he said, "but my mother wants you still." They went on together, passed round the cloister wing to the south of the house: the bell turret over the inner hall and the crowded roofs stood up against the stars, as they came up the curving flight of shallow steps from the garden to the tall doorway that led ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson

... years ago there dwelt in a cloister a monk named Urban, who was remarkable for his earnest and fervent piety. He was a studious reader of the learned and sacred volumes in the convent library. One day he read in the Epistles of St. Peter the words, "One day ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools

... the monastery from which it had issued, whereupon a scrutiny was made to ascertain, by means of the dates, whether the errand had been duly performed. "After many months' absence," says Dr. Rock, "the messenger would reach his own cloister, carrying back with him the illuminated death-bill, now filled to its fullest length with dates and elegies, for his abbot to see that the behest of the chapter had been duly done, and the library of the house enriched with ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell

... fifty-six, and re-enforced the mask of ugliness with the mask of age. A quavering voice, a whimsical mind. This old dame had once been young—astonishing fact! In her youth, in '93, she had married a monk who had fled from his cloister in a red cap, and passed from the Bernardines to the Jacobins. She was dry, rough, peevish, sharp, captious, almost venomous; all this in memory of her monk, whose widow she was, and who had ruled over her masterfully ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... report that reached her related how a cloud of lime had suddenly descended from a broken arch of the cloister on the solemn verger, on his way to escort the Dean to the Minster, powdering his wig, whitening his black gown from collar to hem, and not a little ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge

... had a very sensible theory that boarding-school girls should be kept little girls, until their school life was over, and they stepped out, fresh and eager and spontaneous, to greet the grown-up world. Saint Ursula's was a cloister, in fact, as in name. The masculine half of the human species ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster

... suspects as such. It is well known that there was a faithful portrait of Alexander VI and his children above the altar of S. Lucia in the Church of S. Maria del Popolo, the work of Pinturicchio. Later, when Alexander restored this church, the painting was removed to the court of the cloister, and eventually it ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius

... was truly convinced that no nun in cloister was as hopelessly certain of safety from world and flesh and devil as was her heart and its meditations, under the aegis of ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers

... vied with the poorest peasants in eagerly entering this order, to share the labors of the mission within its sphere, and to participate in its spiritual benefits. Among the persons of this order, who were expelled from their cloister homes during the revolution which agitated Europe in 1848, was Sister Teresa Hackelmayer. This nun, at the proposal of a missionary father in America, and by permission of her Superior, came to New York in the winter of 1851, to establish a community of her ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland

... contents were meant. As a sample of this hostility we quote the pedagog, philologian, and historian Dr. Ludwig Gurlitt (Die Zukunft, Vol. 17, No. 6, p.222): "At the beginning of the sixteenth century," he says, "a monk eloped from a cloister and wrote a religious book of instruction for the German children. At the time it was a bold innovation, the delight of all freethinkers and men of progress, of all who desired to serve the future. This book, which will soon ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente

... just within the iron gates, forming a part of the chief quadrangle. There was a little cloister outside, and from that sheltered place he knew he could look in at the window of their ordinary room, and see who was within. The iron gates were shut, but his hand was familiar with the fastening, and drawing it back by thrusting in his wrist between the bars, he passed through ...
— The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargin • Charles Dickens

... subject or the slave, the captive or the criminal, arose in a moment the free and equal companion of the victorious Moslems. Every sin was expiated, every engagement was dissolved: the vow of celibacy was superseded by the indulgence of nature; the active spirits who slept in the cloister were awakened by the trumpet of the Saracens; and in the convulsion of the world, every member of a new society ascended to the natural level of his capacity and courage. The minds of the multitude were tempted by the invisible as well as temporal blessings of the Arabian prophet; and ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon

... renounce the world and have strength to live in seclusion,' she answered. I made bold and replied that I thought it required much greater strength to go on the battlefield of the world and be good than live within the impenetrable walls of a cloister where bin cannot come. 'But, child, thou wilt see beautiful things made by the hand of man that will fill thy heart leaving not room for the Divine Presence.' 'Nay,' said I, 'I shall see God's work in every ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne

... and done, his claim to immortality lies less in the books which deal with the splendours and the scandals of his own age than in that monument of learning, of humour, of pathos, and of narrative skill, 'The Cloister and the Hearth.'* It is not too much to say of this book that, on its own lines, it is without a rival. To the reader it seems to be not less than the revival of a dead age. To assert dogmatically that the bygone people with whom it deals could not have been other than it paints them would ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray

... partly in the words of the old surveyors.—It consisted of two principal quadrangles besides the dial court, the buttery court and the dove-house court, in which the offices were situated. The fountain court was a square of 86 feet, on the east side of which was a cloister of seven arches. On the ground floor of this quadrangle was a spacious hall; the roof of which was arched with carved timber of curious workmanship. On the same floor were the lord Holland's, the marquis of Hamilton's, and lord Salisbury's apartments, ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin

... hundred paces through a natural cloister of basalt until he arrived at a large uncovered court of the same formation, which a stranger might easily have been excused for believing to have been formed and smoothed by art. In its centre bubbled up a perpetual spring, ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli

... lessons, or were inwardly ready to learn them, they recognised more and more clearly in Jesus their heaven-sent redeemer, and in following their own conscience and desperate idealism into the desert or the cloister, in ignoring all civic virtues and allowing the wealth, art, and knowledge of the pagan world to decay, they began what they felt to ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... I did the theatricals of the town, and on Thursdays and Fridays—but never mind! girls were out of the question in my case, and he knew that the bachelor hall where I preside was as difficult of access as a cloister. I might not have given my word without further deliberation, had not the impetuous Colonel seized us bodily and borne us back into his smoking-room, where he was about to shatter the wax on a flagon of wine, a brand of fabulous age and excellence. Bartholomew nodded to Alf, Alf passed the ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard

... to the pavement of white and ruddy marble, polished, and reflecting like a mirror the columns which rise from it. Over this I walked to a door that admitted me into the principal quadrangle of the convent, surrounded by a cloister supported on Ionic pillars, beautifully proportioned. A flight of stairs opens into the court, adorned with balustrades and pedestals, sculptured with elegance truly Grecian. This brought me to the refectory, where the chef-d'oeuvre of Paul Veronese, representing the marriage of Cana in ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford

... minds of the oldest inhabitants. However, even the oldest inhabitants breathed a deep sigh of relief, when finally they were housed in the brand-new church up beside the college campus, a real stone church, with transepts and painted windows and choir-stalls within, and a cloister and a grand tall tower without. The ramshackle old wooden church had been dear to them, had even remained dear to them after the railroad had laid down its tracks under their very eaves; but they were fretted by the crudely caustic comments of strangers coming to ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray

... the labour of camping amongst four gave us all some leisure at night, and I found time to read through again The Cloister and the Hearth and Westward Ho! with much pleasure, quite agreeing with Sir Walter Besant's judgment that the former is one of the best historical novels ever written. There are few more attractive roysterers in literature ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck

... Go thou and view it, All desolately sunk, The circle of the Druid, The cloister of the monk; The abbey boled and squalid, With its bush-maned, staggering wall; Ask by whom these were unhallow'd— Change, change ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... heard of "David Copperfield" or of Dickens. Nor had they ever heard of "Gulliver's Travels," nor of "The Vicar of Wakefield." They had heard the name "Robinson Crusoe," but they did not know it was the name of an entrancing romance. "Little Women," "John Halifax, Gentleman," "The Cloister and the Hearth," "Les Miserables," were also unknown, unheard-of literary treasures. They were equally ignorant of the existence of the conventional Sunday-school romance. They stared at me in amazement when ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson

... room was, being windowless, though the golden sunlight could be seen beyond the open doorway, which was under a sort of cloister or verandah overhung by some climbing plant. Arthur, collecting himself, reminded the child how the waves had borne them away from the rest, with earnest soothing promises of care, and endeavouring to get back to the rest. 'Say your prayers that God will take care of ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge

... avenge him, but we must be patient, and await their onslaught. Then will come our turn! then will we spring at their dastard throats! then shall they drink freely of their own gore!" If the man of the sword thought the case hopeless, what could the men of the cloister do? They did all in their power—prayed ceaselessly, fasted, did penance under the guidance of Father Austin; but nevertheless the fatal ...
— The Forest of Vazon - A Guernsey Legend Of The Eighth Century • Anonymous

... could not be kept now as of yore. One attempt after another to bring back the old monastic discipline had failed deplorably. The Cluniac revival had been followed by the Cluniac laxity, splendour, and ostentation. The Cistercians, who for a generation had been the sour puritans of the cloister, had become the most potent religious corporation in Europe; but theirs was the power of the purse now. Where had the old strictness and the old fervour gone? Each man was lusting for all that was not his own; but free alms, where were they? ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp

... very glad to undergo this labour, hoping to make the Duchess, who was after all a person of intelligence, as indeed I had the means of observing at a later period, repent of having done so great a wrong both to the marble and herself. Giovanni the Fleming also made a model in the cloister of S. Croce; Vinzenzio Danti of Perugia another in the house of Messer Ottaviano de' Medici; the son of Moschino began a third at Pisa, and Bartolommeo Ammanato a fourth in the Loggia, which ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini

... the cloisters, which is perfect for three sides of the quadrangle, a magnificent view is obtained through the fine old Gothic open window, which looks down sheer to the great depth below, and commands the entire country seaward. Descending into the courtyard to the northern cloister we pass two large sarcophagi of white marble. One of these has been elaborately worked in rich garlands of flowers and very grand bulls' heads, together with nude figures, all of which have been much damaged. These sarcophagi ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker

... said the duenna, with a most sanctimonious look, "I am innocent—innocent, as the child unborn: yet if it so pleaseth Heaven, that I should be immured in a cloister, the Lord's will be done; a convent has no terrors for me; alas! a poor humble sinner can desire no better abode; but think, Senor, how galling it is to be forced by compulsion to embrace a state, that ought to be embraced ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio

... chronicle I adopted the fiction of a Spanish monk as the chronicler. Fray Antonio Agapida was intended as a personification of the monkish zealots who hovered about the sovereigns in their campaigns, marring the chivalry of the camp by the bigotry of the cloister, and chronicling in rapturous strains every act of intolerance toward the Moors. In fact, scarce a sally of the pretended friar when he bursts forth in rapturous eulogy of some great stroke of selfish ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving

... inside, the battle seemed to leave her isolated, the passage was as still as a cloister after the turmoil outside, and she stumbled along in the dim red glow, barely avoiding tripping over a body on the floor which a glance showed her to be a corpse. This was the man who had tried to crush back the rock door ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle

... prince, having made a vow of chastity, notwithstanding his marriage with Keneswitha, a Mercian princess, daughter to Penda, went in pilgrimage to Rome, and shut himself up during the rest of his life in a cloister. Selred, his successor, reigned thirty-eight years, and was the last of the royal line; the failure of which threw the kingdom into great confusion, and reduced it to dependence under Mercia [w]. Switherd first acquired the crown, by ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume

... I felt as much as she seemed to do, when compelled to give way to prudence. But where was the safety in cultivating an intimacy with a beautiful and susceptible girl, whose heart, you are aware, must be given either to the cloister or to ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... their Studies, with that Reservation and Retiredness, which is proper to a Monkish life in Popish Cloisters; wherein the Spirit of Mutual envie, of detraction and division is more irreconcilably entertained, then in anie other Societies of the World. For their Cloister-constitutions, obliging them onely to the observation of som formal works as an opus operatum; for which their maintenance is allowed them; they not knowing anie further design of their life, or any greater happiness in this World, then to pleas themselvs; bestow ...
— The Reformed Librarie-Keeper (1650) • John Dury

... should save us from regarding the saints of the cloister with impatience or contempt. The limitations incidental to their place in history do not prevent them from being glorious pioneers among the high passes of the spiritual life, who have scaled heights which those who talk glibly ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge

... narrow passage, on one side of which were cells, whilst on the other, it opened by means of large bays, on a vast rectangular cloister quite deserted. A door-window in the passage was ajar: the nun stopped ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre

... thirty-three streams of fair running water flowing through the pastures, and well adapted for the practical uses of agriculture, since they serve for the bathing and cleansing of the animals as well as for the watering of the grass. The plan of the farm-buildings is a large square, like some noble cloister, and in the park outside are barns and ricks of hay and other produce. In the central courtyard are the houses of the governors and captains who direct all the work on the farm. In the outhouses, which ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright

... the reigning Duke, Karl of Wuertemberg, sent Captain Schiller as Recruiting Officer to the Imperial Free-Town Schwaebish-Gmuend; with permission to live with his Family in the nearest Wuertemberg place, the Village and Cloister of Lorch. Lorch lies in a green meadow-ground, surrounded by beech-woods, at the foot of a hill, which is crowned by the weird buildings of the Cloister, where the Hohenstaufen graves are; opposite the Cloister and Hamlet, rise the ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle

... solemn talk, and prayer, that brother band In the golden age of Faith with great free heart Gave thanks to God that blissful eventide, A thousand and four hundred years and more Gone by. But now clear rang the compline bell, And two by two they wended towards their church Across a space for cloister set apart, Yet still with wood-flowers sweet, and scent beside Of sod that evening turned. The night came on; A dim ethereal twilight o'er the hills Deepened to dewy gloom. Against the sky Stood ridge and rock unmarked amid ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere

... cloister Sang to each other; For so many sisters Is there not one brother! Ay, for the partridge, mother! The cat has run away with the partridge! Puss! ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... on the Rhine which is now occupied by Sackingen, and proposed to settle there, but the people warned him off. He appealed to the king of the Franks, who made him a present of the whole region, people and all. He built a great cloister there for women and proceeded to teach in it and accumulate more land. There were two wealthy brothers in the neighborhood, Urso and Landulph. Urso died and Fridolin claimed his estates. Landulph asked for ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... of 400 francs she took a small house with a garden descending to the edge of the Seine. This enclosed, quiet residence vaguely recalled the cloister. It stood in the centre of large fields, and was approached by a narrow path. The windows of the dwelling opened to the river and to the solitary hillocks on the opposite bank. The good lady, who had passed the half century, shut herself up in this solitary retreat, ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola

... confined to the schools; and, though we can never be too grateful for their existence, and the fidelity with which they preserved the knowledge of other days, that is surely a higher attainment in the life of the race, when the learning of the world exceeds the learning of the cloister, the school, and ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell

... think that in this cloister'd spot There would be so much doing. I had look'd To find Savonarola all alone And tempt him in his uneventful cell. Instead o' which—Spurn'd am I? I am I. There was a time, Sir, look to 't! O damnation! What is 't? Anon then! These my toys, ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm

... written in Latin, and music was scored and hymns were composed, and many a rare manuscript was illuminated in crimson and blue and emerald and gold; and we looked through the fair arches into the cloister-garth where in the green sward a grave lay ever ready to receive the remains of the next brother who should pass away from this little earth to the glory of Paradise. What struck W. V. perhaps most of all was, that in some leafy places these holy houses were so ancient that even the blackbirds ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton

... the scene. In the intervals between the hours of prayer and the observance of the round of cloister life, come hours for the copying of books under the presiding genius of Alcuin. The young monks file into the scriptorium, and one of them is given the precious parchment volume containing a work of Bede or Isidore or Augustine, or else some portion of the Latin Scriptures, ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY

... flickering torches they see his unstained sword; But he gazed on those Kings of the kindred, and the beast of war awoke; And his heart was exceeding wrathful with the tarrying of the stroke: And he strode to the chamber of Sigurd, and again they heeded well How the clash, in the cloister awakened, by the threshold died ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris

... the Anthology, and the younger Pliny in Imperial days, held the same tone, elegiac and idyllic[5]; as Villemain says, 'These pleasant pictures, these poetic allusions, do not shew the austerity of the cloister.'[6] The specifically Christian and monastic was hidden by the ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese

... blushed at her own ignorance. Amidst her noble and elegant manners, there is now and then a little touch of bashfulness and conventual rusticity, if I may call it so, that makes her quite enchanting. You see at once the rose that had bloomed untouched amid the chaste precincts of the cloister, Mr. Butler." ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... and personal responsibility to God, went out from the German cloister like a roaring storm and echoed in thunder tones among the columned aisles ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce

... and maintain it. Before ancient authorities men bend from customary and hereditary deference; in our presence they will stand erect, unless they are compelled to prostrate themselves. A daughter fit for the sheepfold or the cloister is ill qualified to exact respect where it is yielded with reluctance; and since Heaven refused us a third boy, Lucy should have held a character fit to supply his place. The hour will be a happy one which disposes her hand in marriage ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott

... [He will steal, sir, an egg out of a cloister] I know not that cloister, though it may etymologically signify any thing shut is used by our author, otherwise than for a monastery, and therefore I cannot guess whence this hyperbole could take its original: perhaps it means only this: He ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson

... sculpture, the pulpit by Niccola Pisano in the Duomo of Siena. I would rather, had it been possible, have given the pulpit by Giovanni Pisano in the Duomo of Pisa; but that pulpit is dispersed in fragments through the upper galleries of the Duomo, and the cloister of the Campo Santo; and the casts of its fragments now put together at Kensington are too coarse to be of use to you. You may partly judge, however, of the method of their execution by the eagle's head, ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin

... better anon. My uncle, the sub-prior, died,—some say of austerities, others of ale,—that matters not; he was a learned man and a cunning. 'Nephew Nicholas,' said he on his death-bed, 'think twice before you tie yourself up to the cloister; it's ill leaping nowadays in a sackcloth bag. If a pious man be moved to the cowl by holy devotion, there is nothing to be said on the subject; but if he take to the Church as a calling, and wish to march ahead like his fellows, these times show him a prettier path to distinction. ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... which was built a staircase in varnished oak. There was a quadrangle, and from three sides the interminable latticed windows looked down on the green sward; on the fourth there was an open corridor, with arches to imitate a cloister. All was strong and barren, and only about the varnished staircase was there any sign of comfort. There a virgin in bright blue stood on a crescent moon; above her the ceiling was panelled in oak, and the banisters, the cocoa nut matting, the bit of stained glass, and the religious prints, suggested ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore

... village that we explored the "College," an old foundation of the reign of Edward III. for the aged poor of both sexes. Each occupant of the various small apartments was sitting at his or her door, which opened on a grassy enclosure with arches like an abandoned cloister of some old cathedral. Such a motley society, brought together under such unnatural circumstances, would of course interest Dickens. He seemed to take a profound pleasure in wandering about the place, which ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields

... Italian, true to his infamous notions as to the sex, "the heart of a girl is like a convent—the holier the cloister, the more ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various

... all the papers and pamphlets from the boy for half a real; and if he had had his wits about him and had known how eager I was for them, he might have safely calculated on making more than six reals by the bargain. I withdrew at once with the Morisco into the cloister of the cathedral, and begged him to turn all these pamphlets that related to Don Quixote into the Castilian tongue, without omitting or adding anything to them, offering him whatever payment he pleased. He was satisfied with two arrobas of raisins and two bushels of wheat, ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... Priam along the cloister to the muffled music of "He will swallow up death in victory." They had not thus proceeded very far when they met ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett

... the first to feel the ground-swell of social democracy which was to sweep later fiction on its mighty tide. "Westward Ho!" is a sterling historical romance, one of the more successful books in a select list which embraces "The Cloister and the Hearth," "Lorna Doone," and "John Inglesant." "Hypatia," examined dispassionately, may be described as an historical romance with elements of greatness rather than a great historical romance. But it shed its glamour over our youth ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton

... in a Convent, say you? Oh! very true, I had forgotten. And how does Donna Agnes? I am amazed, Don Lorenzo, how you could possibly think of immuring so charming a Girl within the walls of a Cloister!' ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis

... at the convent. You are not going to take the veil there, are you? It would be a great pity. No? You wish to lead the life of an intelligent woman who is free and independent? That is well; but it was rather an odd idea to begin by going into a cloister. Oh!—I see, public opinion?" And Madame Strahlberg made a little face, expressive of her contempt for ...
— Jacqueline, v3 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)

... the ordinary barmaid. Nor, as I learnt afterwards, was she considered to be the ordinary barmaid. She was something midway in importance between the wife of the new proprietor and the younger woman who stood beside her in the cloister talking to a being that resembled a commercial traveller. It was the younger woman who was the ordinary barmaid; she had bright hair, and the bright vacant stupidity which, in my narrow experience, barmaids ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett

... be, of life beneath, but in itself worthless. When the man arises with a servant's heart and a ruler's brain, then is the summer of the Church's content. But whether the men who wrote the following songs moved in some shining orbit of rank, or only knelt in some dim chapel, and walked in some pale cloister, we cannot tell, for they have left ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald

... of two Norman windows seem to indicate that here, as elsewhere, a slype, with a room above it, intervened between the south end of the transept and the chapter-house. This slype was generally a passage connecting the cloister garth with the smaller garth to the south of the choir which was often used as a burying-place for the abbots or priors, as the case may be, and was the place where the monks or canons interviewed visitors and chapmen. The room above was often used ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Wimborne Minster and Christchurch Priory • Thomas Perkins

... In the cloister are some frescoes of the universal Domenichino. I like the Convent of San Onofrio. To Santa Maria in Trastevere, a very fine church; splendid ceiling with a Domenichino in the middle. Immense granite columns of various orders taken ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville

... Sarini, at Bologna, was, in 1796, a friar, but relinquished then the convent for the tent, and exchanged the breviary for the musket. He married a nun of one cloister, from whom he procured a divorce in a month, to unite himself with an Abbess of another, deserted by him in her turn for the wife of an innkeeper, who robbed and eloped from her husband. Last spring he returned to the bosom of the Church, and, by making our Empress a present of a ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton

... that had worn a look of deep dejection, became distorted with pain. "Oh, it is horrible! And this cloister is ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine

... creek. This town, which is subject to an Arabian prince, is very strongly fortified, and surrounded by several ranges of extraordinarily formed rocks, all of which are also occupied by forts and towers. The largest of these excites a sad reminiscence: it was formerly a cloister of Portuguese monks, and was attacked by the Arabs one night, who murdered the whole of its inmates. This occurrence took ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer

... chaplain of Saint Benoit-le-Betourne, near the Sorbonne. From him he borrowed the surname by which he is known to posterity. It was most likely from his house, called the "Porte Rouge," and situated in a garden in the cloister of St. Benoit, that Master Francis heard the bell of the Sorbonne ring out the Angelus while he was finishing his "Small Testament" at Christmastide in 1456. Towards this benefactor he usually gets credit for a respectable display ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... about in this laborious world like helpless babes in the wood; bright-eyed, luxurious young Greeks, rebelling against pain and intolerant of toil, struggling in vain to hold their own among keen, restless Yankees; dreamy mystics, strayed from the shadows of some cloister, their vague eyes dazzled by the sun; artists of early Italy, worshiping the mediaeval Madonna; poets, belonging of right to the court of Elizabeth, or companions of the wandering and disastrous fortunes of "the fairest ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various

... have been made in the sides of the mountain. At A (Fig. 2), on a level with the ground, is seen a great cloister ornamented with a series of bass reliefs representing the principal gods of the Hindoo paradise. The side walls contain large, two-storied halls ornamented with superb sculptures of various divinities. Columns of squat proportions support the ceilings. A small ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 643, April 28, 1888 • Various

... would be the heartlessness, to say nothing of the guilt, of one that would keep him away? For what, except that this strength and comfort might be at the service of Christ's flock, had her own life been spent? It was expressly for this that she had lived on in England when peace and the cloister might be hers elsewhere; and now that her own life was touched, should she fail?... The blindness passed like a dream, and her soul rose up again on a wave of ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson

... This blossom do but promise such a flower As promises in turn its kindly fruit: Forthwith upon your brows the royal crown, That now weighs heavy on my aged brows, I will devolve; and while I pass away Into some cloister, with my Maker there To make my peace in penitence and prayer, Happily settle the disorder'd realm That now cries loudly for ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca

... egg-chamber slung in the centre and isolated on every side by half a score of pillars; the front-hall expanding into a wide mouth and surmounted by a network of taut threads forming a trap. The semi-transparency of the walls allows us to see the Spider engaged in her household affairs. Her cloister of vaulted passages enables her to proceed to any point of the star-shaped pouch containing the eggs. Indefatigable in her rounds, she stops here and there; she fondly feels the satin, listens to the secrets of the wallet. If I shake the net at any point with a straw, she quickly runs ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre

... Don Amato, the hunter of that fawn, save her from the holy ambush. Tut, tut, Chevalier. Let her go. Your nephew is to marry her sister; let her be swallowed up—a shame behind the veil, the sweet litany of the cloister." ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... in the moat and birds nested in the embrasures, while Leo's dogs bounded through chapel and refectory and cloister, parts of the latter ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays

... 1833, a very holy Brahman, who lived in his cloister near the iron suspension bridge over the Bias river, ten miles from Sagar, sat down with a determination to wrestle with the Deity till he should be compelled to reveal to him the real cause of all these calamities of season under which the people were groaning.[l3] After three ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman

... and still, like a cloister, with here a little woman who, tucked into her hooded cloak, crept along the houses to the church; there a smith who hammered ... and the little church-bell, which tinkled ...
— The Path of Life • Stijn Streuvels

... pine in cloister; We cannot fast and pray; The sword which built our load of guilt Must wipe ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley

... cosy cloister. She wondered how she could have conceived such a thought of Sibyl, who, dressed so simply, had a girlish air, a beauty as of maidenhood. Exhilarated by her ambitious hopes, she turned in heart to the old friendship, felt her admiration revive, ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing

... his foot on the top rung of the ladder. He could not, therefore, be very far away, the more so as he had taken the precaution to remove the ladder, in order to prevent the inmates of the house from using it. And soon she saw him skirting the remains of the old cloister. She put the gun to her shoulder, calmly took aim and ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc

... partly surrounded by a colonnade, quite cloister-like in effect. At the right center of the Francois I. wing is that wonderful spiral staircase, concerning the invention of which so much ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various

... wished all people and things to be humble with him. When he halted he wanted the world to halt; when he entered a cathedral—Notre Dame or any other; or a great building—the Law Courts at Rouen or any other; he simply wanted people to say, wanted the cathedral, or at least the cloister, to whisper to itself, "Here comes ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... fountain in the middle, and an altar to the hero forefather of the master, where, before each meal, offerings were made and wine poured out. The rooms were very small, and used for little but sleeping; and the men lived chiefly in the cloister or pillared walks round the court. There was a kind of back-court for the women of the family, who did not often appear in the front one, though they were not shut up like Eastern women. Most Greeks had farms, which they ...
— Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History • Charlotte M. Yonge

... Of course, there are cases Of downright deception: One pilgrim's a thief, Or another may wheedle Some cloth from the wife Of a peasant, exchanging Some "sanctified wafers" 30 Or "tears of the Virgin" He's brought from Mount Athos, And then she'll discover He's been but as far As a cloister near Moscow. One saintly old greybeard Enraptured the people By wonderful singing, And offered to teach The young girls of the village 40 The songs of the church With their mothers' permission. And all through the winter He locked himself up With the girls in a stable. From thence, sometimes ...
— Who Can Be Happy And Free In Russia? • Nicholas Nekrassov

... merchant princes like to have lordships and estates abroad? Believe me, rightly understood, it would be a prouder, and in the full sense of our English word, more "respectable" thing to be lord of a palace at Verona, or of a cloister full of frescoes at Florence, than to have a file of servants dressed in the finest liveries that ever tailor stitched, as long as would reach from here to Bolton:—yes, and a prouder thing to send people to travel in Italy, who would have to say every now and then, of some fair piece of ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin

... adventuress! I do not deny it. I came here to confess it to you. I went to New York, to London, to Paris, to Petrograd; I went all over the world. I had beautiful dresses, jewels, admiration—all that women live for! And in the midst of it all mine was the life of the cloister; no nun ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer

... with its lofty western and central towers, rose above the monastic buildings, which were enclosed by a wall. To the north was a great cloister, with the various conventual offices, to the southwest lay the cemetery and church of St. Mary, while immediately before the west front of the church stood the Norman tower leading ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various

... expression of the man in a riot of color in walls and hangings and in ill-assorted mobs of furniture. Here again I was wrong. We passed the grilled doors into a place so gray and cold that it might have led us to a cloister. We mounted broad stairs, our footfalls muffled by a heavy carpeting of so unobtrusive a color that I cannot name it. We crossed a white panelled hall, so sparsely furnished that the untutored might have thought that the family were just moving in or just moving ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd

... of the church is curiously complicated. To the left is the little baptistery; directly before one, a narrow stairway which leads to the Cloister; and on the right, a low-arched vestibule which opens into the nave of the Cathedral. The interior of Saint-Etienne is dark and somewhat gloomy, but that is an inherent trait of a fortress-church, for every added inch of window-opening brought an ell of ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose

... PARAGRAPH IS THE INCOMPLETENESS OF OUR LORD'S TEACHING.—For three and a half years He was perpetually pouring forth His wonderful words; in many different places—the market-place, the home at Bethany, the hillside, the Temple cloister; to many different audiences—now in thronging crowds, and again to the secret disciple whose footfall startled the night, or the lone woman drawing water from the well; on many different themes—to mention all of which would be impossible, though ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer

... You, who are so gay, so full of life and health and exuberant spirits, immure yourself in a cloister! Impossible!" ...
— Which? - or, Between Two Women • Ernest Daudet

... his harp his pathetic elegies, the cruelty of Sabina his lady, and his adventures in England, Spain and Persia. He was a noble, courtly knight, conversing in French, Moorish, Catalonian, Castilian, German, Latin, Wendisch, Lombardic and Russian; and his bones lie in the great cloister of Neustift, not half a day's journey ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various

... upon practical life, though they should not be regarded as the motive of our studies, may be used to answer a doubt to which the solitary student must always be liable. In a world so full of evil and suffering, retirement into the cloister of contemplation, to the enjoyment of delights which, however noble, must always be for the few only, cannot but appear as a somewhat selfish refusal to share the burden imposed upon others by accidents in which justice plays ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell

... for another is never lost sight of. The jealousy of that other lover, for whom these words and images and refined ways of sentiment were first devised, is the secret here of a borrowed, perhaps factitious colour and heat. It is the mood of the cloister taking a new direction, and winning so a later space of life ...
— Aesthetic Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater

... George's nature flavoured his language, alike in manner of delivery and turn of phrase. It had a quaint old-world style; it fell slowly, in a low, soothing voice. He might have spent his, days in the cloister, rather than in the din of hammering up hearths for the Anglo- Saxon. Perhaps it was that he had talked so long to the hills of Oceana, catching their simplicity and music. You were reminded of the measured ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne

... in that my boast is true: The accident which brought me to her eye, Upon the moment did her force subdue, And now she would the caged cloister fly: Religious love put out religion's eye: Not to be tempted, would she be immur'd, And now, to ...
— A Lover's Complaint • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]

... secularized: and the minority who could not tolerate the secularization of her ideals took refuge in the hermit's cell or in the cloister. In these retreats was developed the practice of Christianity as an art or science of individual sanctity, but at the cost of a certain aloofness from the rough and tumble of workaday life. The Christianity ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson

... Launcelot departed and rode westerly, and there he sought many days; and at last he came to a nunnery, and was seen of Queen Guenever as he walked in the cloister; and when she saw him she swooned away. And when she might speak she bade him to be called to her. And when Sir Launcelot was brought to her she said: "Sir Launcelot, I require thee and beseech thee, for all the love that ever was betwixt us, that thou never see me more, ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch

... Church of Soroe, Bishop Absalon, the founder of Copenhagen, lies buried. It is said that this Bishop's spirit appears, with menacing attitude, if anyone desecrates the place by irreverence. Ludvig Holberg is also buried in this cloister church, as well ...
— Denmark • M. Pearson Thomson

... idle and extravagant it may appear in the present day, was in unison with the temper of the times, and of the court to which it was proposed. The vein of mystic erudition by which it was enforced, likewise, was suited to an age when the reveries of the cloister still controlled the operations of the cabinet and the camp. The spirit of the crusades had not yet passed away. In the cause of the church, and at the instigation of its dignitaries, every cavalier was ready to draw his sword; and religion mingled a glowing ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving

... but it was not all. The marquise, as we know, had taken refuge in a convent, where Desgrais dared not arrest her by force, for two reasons: first, because she might get information beforehand, and hide herself in one of the cloister retreats whose secret is known only to the superior; secondly, because Liege was so religious a town that the event would produce a great sensation: the act might be looked upon as a sacrilege, and might bring about a popular rising, ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE



Words linked to "Cloister" :   skirt, surround, residence, border, monastery, faith, convent, religious residence, priory, ring, insulate, environ, courtyard, religion



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