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Cloister   Listen
verb
Cloister  v. t.  (past & past part. cloistered; pres. part. cloistering)  To confine in, or as in, a cloister; to seclude from the world; to immure. "None among them are thought worthy to be styled religious persons but those that cloister themselves up in a monastery."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Cloister" Quotes from Famous Books



... hand; 'Wilt thou be Queen of all the land?' —O red she blush'd and proudly! Red as the crimson girdle bound Beneath her gracious breast; Red as the silken scarf that flames Above his lion-crest. She lifts and casts the cloister-veil All on the cloister-floor:— The novice maids of Romsey smile, And think of ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave

... something unsatisfied, of an unrest impossible to analyze, still less to describe, yet not incomprehensible; a something ready to break out if occasion calls into flying upleaping flame? It is the accidia of the cloister; a trace of sourness, of ferment engendered by the enforced stagnation of youthful energies, ...
— A Prince of Bohemia • Honore de Balzac

... whole countryside teems with Saxon names and memories! And the old moated grange at Compton, nestled close under the hillside, where twenty Marianas may have lived, with its bright water-lilies in the moat, and its yew walk, "the cloister walk," and its peerless terraced gardens. There they all are, and twenty things beside, for those who care about them, and have eyes. And these are the sort of things you may find, I believe, every one of you, in ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes

... they set down to roast before the fire; many a jar, too, did they broach of my father's wine. Nine whole nights did they set a guard over me taking it in turns to watch, and they kept a fire always burning, both in the cloister of the outer court and in the inner court at the doors of the room wherein I lay; but when the darkness of the tenth night came, I broke through the closed doors of my room, and climbed the wall of the outer court after passing quickly and ...
— The Iliad • Homer

... that has outgrown both the classroom and the cloister. It is the anonymous religion that we must take into account in the future if the church is to progress with ...
— Captain Pott's Minister • Francis L. Cooper

... feet every way. The lofty rock on which it stood had been cased with solid masonry, so that it rose perpendicularly from the plain. On the top of this massive foundation was built a strong and lofty wall, round the whole area. Within this wall was a spacious double cloister, fifty-two and one half feet broad, supported by one hundred and sixty-two columns. On the south side the cloister was one hundred and five feet wide—being a triple cloister—and was here called the King's Cloister. Within the area surrounded by the cloisters was an open court, paved ...
— For the Temple - A Tale of the Fall of Jerusalem • G. A. Henty

... accomplishment of this project, the plan was only postponed, not abandoned. The speedy marriage of Sir Ratcliffe followed. Circumstances had prevented Glastonbury from being present at the ceremony. It was impossible for him to retire to the cloister without seeing his pupil. Business, if not affection, rendered an interview between them necessary. It was equally impossible for Glastonbury to trouble a bride and bridegroom with his presence. When, however, three months had elapsed, ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli

... time he returned once more to Palais, to see his mother, who was about to enter the cloister, as his father had done some time before. When this visit was over, instead of returning to Paris to lecture on dialectic, he went to Laon to study theology under the then famous Anselm. Here, convinced of the showy superficiality of Anselm, he once ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner

... 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 and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various

... of the deeds, which must have been so often talked of upon the Temple terrace and in the Temple cloister, must be narrated, to show that, however mistaken was the ideal of the Crusaders, these monkish warriors fought their best to turn it into a reality. In 1146 the whole brotherhood joined the second Crusade, and protected the rear of the ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury

... wore his sword and buckler, in readiness to repel an attack which he feared from his competitor. The story is very vague, and I hunted it down in divers authorities only to find it grow more and more intangible and uncertain. But it gave a singular relish to our daily walk through the old cloister, and I added, for my own pleasure (and chiefly out of my own fancy, I am afraid, for I can nowhere localize the fable on which I built), that the rivalry between the painters was partly a love- jealousy, and that the disputed ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells

... mountains on whose peaks 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 to the white sandy shore, laid him on the warm sand, taking care that his head ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King

... night, one fresh spring morn Forth from the cloister Aloysius strolled. The wood was dewy-bright, clear beams of gold Illumined it, and to his heart was borne A sense of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various

... that something had happened, for, contrary to their usual practice, they sat, thirty of them, in stony silence, waiting for me to begin the lesson. As far as I remember anything, they waited the whole hour. The lesson over, I passed along the cloister on my way to my rooms. I overheard one of my urchins, clattering in front of me, ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke

... dome! Religion's shrine! repentant HENRY'S [2] pride! Of Warriors, Monks, and Dames the cloister'd tomb, Whose pensive shades ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron

... oddity without a gleam of philosophy; 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 ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton

... towards the porter's lodge, he suddenly plunged into the thickest belt of shrubs, and left the road clear. Paulina seized the moment, and, with a palpitating heart, quickened her steps towards the cloister. ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey

... drawbridge, the visitors came to the Palace of Justice, built by Akbar. It is six hundred feet long, enclosed by a colonnade of arches, like a cloister. It is now used as a military storeroom, divided by brick walls, and filled with cannon and shot. The English have made a sort of museum here; and the superior officer who did the honors to his lordship showed them the throne ...
— Across India - Or, Live Boys in the Far East • Oliver Optic

... 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 ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm

... 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 short as if the only thing to do were to accept the law of one's ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James

... worthy chronicler was going to Haslach on the 3rd of July, 1835, to examine with his own eyes a little bronze Mercury recently unearthed in the old cloister of the Augustins. ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian

... and married a wealthy rival. This disappointment preyed so deeply on Belzoni, that, renouncing at the same time love and the razor, the world and the brazen bowl of suds, he entered a convent, and became a Capuchin. The leisure of the cloister was employed by him in the study of hydraulics; and he was busy in constructing an Artesian well within the monastic precincts when the French army under Napoleon took possession of Rome. The monks of every order ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various

... In that great cloister's stillness and seclusion, By guardian angels led, Safe from temptation, safe from sin's pollution, She lives whom we ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various

... at the end of the eleventh century, the Cistercians, and, a few decades later, the Premonstrants sprang up: the former in Burgundy (Citeaux), the latter in a woody country near Laon (Premontre). The order of Carthusians, founded about the year {88} 1084, which commenced with a cloister of anchorites (Carthusia, Chartreuse) in a rugged valley near Grenoble, was the most austere in its practice. A life of solitude and silence in a cell, a spare and meagre diet, a penitential garment of hair, flagellations, and the rigid practices of devotional ...
— Mysticism and its Results - Being an Inquiry into the Uses and Abuses of Secrecy • John Delafield

... never heard who invented it—that an author is finally judged by his best work. This would be comforting to authors if true: but is it true? A day or two ago I picked up on a railway bookstall a copy of Messrs. Chatto & Windus's new sixpenny edition of The Cloister and the Hearth, and a capital edition it is. I think I must have worn out more copies of this book than of any other; but somebody robbed me of the pretty "Elzevir edition" as soon as it came out, and so I have only just read ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... The first composition of his was a sacred drama called "La Conversione di St. Guglielmo," written while he was still a student. It was performed with comic intermezzi (sic!) in the summer of 1731, at the cloister of St. Agnello. The dramatic element in this work is very pronounced, and the violin is treated with considerable feeling. His first opera, "La Salustia," was produced in 1731. It is notable for improvement in the orchestration. In the winter of this same year ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews

... how many good works you have before you in your home, with your child, that needs all these things like a hungry, thirsty, naked, poor, imprisoned, sick soul. O what a blessed marriage and home were that where such parents were to be found! Truly it would be a real Church, a chosen cloister, yea, a paradise. Of such says Psalm cxxviii: "Blessed are they that fear God, and walk in His Commandments; thou shalt eat of the labor of thine hands; therefore thou shalt be happy, and it shall be well ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther

... as with seaweed—evidently the high-shouldered sentinel of some great gentleman's estate. A yard or two from the wall ran parallel to it a linked and tangled line of lime-trees, forming a kind of cloister along the side of the road. It was under this branching colonnade that the two fugitives fled, almost concealed from their pursuers by the twilight, the mist and the leaping zoetrope of shadows. Their feet, ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton

... eagerly accepted, and the crew, headed by Captain Breakes, marched up to the nunnery unopposed, and were welcomed at the door by the lady abbess. Having entered the peaceful cloister, each pirate chose a nun and marched back to the ship with their spoils. Soon after this Breakes decided to retire from piracy, and returned to Amsterdam to claim Mrs. Snyde. But he found that she had but lately been ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse

... go beyond which lay their grasp upon the men who know, and wish, and will. But neither his knowledge, nor his actions, nor his will, had found direction. He had fled from social life from necessity; as a great criminal seeks the cloister. Remorse, that virtue of weak beings, did not touch him. Remorse is impotence, impotence which sins again. Repentance alone is powerful; it ends all. But in traversing the world, which he made his ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac

... 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 and bent her to his will. She was a nettle in which the rustle of the cassock ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... light, show wan and woeful; withal, lovely as ever; piquant in their pale beauty, like those of some rebellious nun hating the hood, discontented with cloister and convent. ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid

... anxious Dorothy and gave an agreeable turn to the thoughts of all. So, at a nod of consent, the girls sped along the cloister, seeking the great kitchen and the salaaming ...
— Dorothy on a Ranch • Evelyn Raymond

... Conquer" or Sheridan's "School for Scandal." His power as a novelist was marvelous. Who can forget the madhouse episodes in Hard Cash, or the great trial scene in Griffith Gaunt, or that wonderful picture, in The Cloister and the Hearth, of Germany and Rome at the end of the Middle Ages? Here genius has touched the dead past and made it glow again with ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr

... take his leave, and Basil pondered much on what he had heard. It was a new light to him, for, as his instructor suspected, he shared the common view of coenobite aims, and still but imperfectly understood the law of Benedict. All at once the life of this cloister appeared before him in a wider and nobler aspect. In the silent monks bent over their desks he saw much more than piety and learning. They rose to a dignity surpassing that of consul or praefect. With their pens they warred against the powers of darkness, ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing

... described. He was not a Puritan. He was not a freethinker. He was not a Royalist. In his character the noblest qualities of every party were combined in harmonious union. From the Parliament and from the Court, from the conventicle and from the Gothic cloister, from the gloomy and sepulchral circles of the Roundheads, and from the Christmas revel of the hospitable Cavalier, his nature selected and drew to itself whatever was great and good, while it rejected all the base and pernicious ingredients by which those finer elements were ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... triple one, and embraces the three great evangelical counsels of perfect chastity, poverty and obedience. The cloister is necessary for the observance of such engagements as these, and it were easier for a lily to flourish on the banks of the Dead Sea, or amid the fiery blasts of the Sahara, than for these delicate flowers of spirituality to thrive in the midst of the temptations, ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton

... though, a sudden change-took place in Aurore's soul. It would have been strange had it been otherwise. With so extraordinarily sensitive an organization, the new and totally different surroundings could not fail to make an impression. The cloister, the cemetery, the long services, the words of the ritual, murmured in the dimly-lighted chapel, and the piety that seems to hover in the air in houses where many prayers have been offered up—all this acted on the young girl. One evening in August, she had gone into ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic

... before the deep-cushioned sill of a high-arched window, and gazing at the ruined portion of the abbey. The air outside was frosty and clear, and though the moon as yet was only faintly yellow, every arch and cloister was clearly visible. Paul gazed down at them, as he had done all his life, with reverent eyes. There was something almost awesome in the graceful yet bold outline, and in the great age of those rugged, ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... round, and alone, by his own fireside, caught the sound of a voice which he had not heard for years, and the fleeting glimpse of a woman's face which he had fondly loved. Had loved? Yes, still loved. Then the vision of convent walls, a Carmelite cloister, a sister kneeling at the shrine of the Blessed Virgin praying for him, and by her side, feeling her way to the altar rail, Mary, the little blind maid, repeating a fervent amen to her sister's petition; then—darkness about him, cold ashes on the hearth, and in his ...
— A Few Short Sketches • Douglass Sherley

... and saw the Cathedral, which is not of the first rank. The Castle. In one of the rooms the Assizes are held, and the refectory of the Old Abbey, of which part is a grammar school. The master seemed glad to see me. The cloister is very solemn; over it are chambers in which the singing ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell

... were more substantial! How didst get old Wolfgang down, boy? He must have been a tough morsel for slight bones like these, even when better covered than now. Come, tell me all. I promised the Markgraf of Wurtemburg to look into the matter when I came to be guest at St. Ruprecht's cloister, and I have some small interest too with ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge

... the paper sheets was a plan, carefully drawn and instantly recognizable by a person who knew the ground, of the south aisle and cloisters of St Bertrand's. There were curious signs looking like planetary symbols, and a few Hebrew words in the corners; and in the north-west angle of the cloister was a cross drawn in gold paint. Below the plan were some lines of writing ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary • Montague Rhodes James

... revolt of the younger Andronicus to his own abdication of the empire; and it is observed, that, like Moses and Caesar, he was the principal actor in the scenes which he describes. But in this eloquent work we should vainly seek the sincerity of a hero or a penitent. Retired in a cloister from the vices and passions of the world, he presents not a confession, but an apology, of the life of an ambitious statesman. Instead of unfolding the true counsels and characters of men, he displays the smooth and specious surface of events, highly ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon

... 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 was not ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster

... the shores of his fatherland, penetrating with murder and pillage almost to his peaceful home. And so, while he lent a diligent ear to the teachings of the church, earning the name of the "most learned clerk" in the cloister of Ste. Genevieve in Paris, daily he laid the breviary aside and took up sword and lance, learning the arts of modern warfare with the graces of chivalry. In the old way of fighting, man to man, the men of the North had been the ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis

... rationalize the irrational, and irrationalize the rational. And he falls victim of the inevitable despair of a rationalism century, of which the greatest victims were Tolstoy and Nietzsche. Out of despair he enters into the heroic fury of that Quixote of thought who broke out of the cloister, Giordano Bruno, and makes himself awakener of sleeping souls, 'dormitantium animorum excubitor,' as the ex-Dominican says of himself, he who wrote: 'Heroic love is proper to superior natures called insane—insane, ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos

... Anglo-Saxon women, having been initiated into the life of the cloister abroad, returned to England to found monasteries in their own land, they were received by their countrymen with reverence and respect. This respect soon expressed itself in the national law, which placed under the safeguard of severe penalties the honour and freedom of those ...
— Early Double Monasteries - A Paper read before the Heretics' Society on December 6th, 1914 • Constance Stoney

... 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) ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon

... wonder or reluctance, be the temper with which we see the graces of Christian character lifting their meek blossoms in corners strange to us, and breathing their fragrance over the pastures of the wilderness. In many a cloister, in many a hermit's cell, from amidst the smoke of incense, through the dust of controversies, we should see, and be glad to see, faces bright with the radiance caught from Christ. Let us set a jealous ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren

... year 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 ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman

... They called to their aid the mandorlato of Verona, supporting their porch pillars on the backs of couchant lions, inserting polished slabs on their facades, and building huge sarcophagi into their cloister alleys. Between terra-cotta and this marble of Verona there exists a deep and delicate affinity. It took the name of mandorlato, I suppose, from a resemblance to almond blossoms. But it is far from having the simple beauty of a single hue. Like ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... "Normanisms," in the primitive quaintness of their ideas and characters. For a short time he flung himself into their squirrel's life of busy gyrations in a cage. Then he began to feel the want of variety, and grew tired of it. It was like the life of the cloister, cut short before it had well begun. He drifted on till he reached a crisis, which is neither spleen nor disgust, but combines all the symptoms of both. When a human being is transplanted into an uncongenial ...
— The Deserted Woman • Honore de Balzac

... the desert was the first cathedral, the earliest cloister of latest ideals. Set not in one desert merely but in two, in the infinite of time as well as in that of space, there was about it a limitlessness in which the past could sleep, the future awake, ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus

... and all that truly I could have hoped for, and I told him so. About us was quiet, vacant cloister, and we parted more warmly ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston

... 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 documents and papers. Fridolin had none to show. He said the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... wise in nautical matters as had preceded the Genoese mariner never could have overlooked such an idea as this which had presented itself to his mind. Moreover, as the learning of the middle ages resided for the most part in the cloister, the member's of the junta were principally clerical, and combined to crush Columbus with theological objections. Texts of Scripture were adduced to refute his theory of the spherical shape of the earth, and the weighty authority ...
— The Life of Columbus • Arthur Helps

... time our narrative commences Louis was seriously meditating his flight from home and the world to bury himself in some cloister of religion. His studies of philosophy and history had convinced him of the immortality of the soul and the vanity of all human greatness. In his frequent meditations he became more and more attracted towards the only lasting, imperishable ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly

... northern Italy. In 1817 he published "La Fuggitiva," a love story of the French wars, which found great favor. Inspired by his intercourse with Manzoni, a few years later he wrote "Ildegonda," a romantic poem treating of the times of chivalry and cloister life. This poem won a great success. Less happy was his attempt to rival Tasso with an epic poem in fifteen cantos on the Crusades. Among his prose tales, the most lasting in interest are the historical novel "Marco Visconti" and the idyl "Ulrico e ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson

... 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 as ...
— Denmark • M. Pearson Thomson

... had carried her to a window, and knelt with her there, staring out toward the park and calling upon God to have mercy. Through the streaming mist, there came presently toward them two dim figures, carrying a third—what need to go on? After that, the house became a cloister. ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson

... in search of better prospects to the other capital of the rich mining district. Here, at Mansfeld, or, more strictly, at Lower Mansfeld, as it is called, from its position, and to distinguish it from Cloister-Mansfeld, he came among a people whose whole life and labour were devoted to mining. The town itself lay on the banks of a stream, inclosed by hills, on the edge of the Harz country. Above it towered the stately castle ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin

... therefore, from all influences which could in the least warp or bias his thoughts. It was necessary that he should lean no way; that he should contemplate, with absolute equality of judgment, the life of the court, cloister, and tavern, and be able to sympathize so completely with all creatures as to deprive himself, together with his personal identity, even of his conscience, as he casts himself into their hearts. He must ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin

... of the Convent of the Visitation at Clermont. She saved from the cloister Christine Hallegrain, who had not a religious vocation, and obtained for her a situation to ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson

... delirium of her pious contemplations embellished and preserved the first years of her youth, composed the rest by her philosophy, and seemed as if it must preserve her for ever from the tempests of passion. Her devotion was ardent; it took the tints of her soul, and she aspired to the cloister, and dreamed of martyrdom. Entering a convent, she found there propitious moments, surrendering her thoughts to mysticism and her heart to first friendships. The monotonous regularity of this life ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine

... long effaced the inscriptions On the cloister's funeral stones, And tradition only tells us Where repose the poet's bones. But around the vast cathedral By sweet echoes mutiplied[TN-12] Still the birds repeat the legend And the name ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer

... pacing the gravel path between the cloister and the church, with his chancellor at his side. His cowl was thrown back and the white gown of his Order, which hung full to his feet, was fastened close to the throat. His face was pale, and the well-cut features ...
— Beatrix of Clare • John Reed Scott

... Cambuskenneth, on the banks of the Forth. Abbot Mylne, a man both of culture and character, who to a genuine love of letters added a love of art and architecture, and who was ultimately the first President of the Court of Session, had re-built the great altar, the chapter-house, and part of the cloister of his Abbey, and had laid out two new cemeteries. In order to signalise these notable additions and restorations he invited the Bishop of Dunblane to conduct a consecration and dedication service. The Bishop was ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various

... personal in detail than Browning often allows himself to be; and its humour is blithe and friendly. In another poem, now known as Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister, the humour is grotesque, bitter and pungent, the humour of hate. The snarling monk of the Spanish cloister pours out on poor, innocent, unsuspecting "Brother Lawrence" a wealth of really choice and masterly vituperation, not to be matched out of Shakespeare. The poem is a clever study of that mood of active disgust which most of us have felt toward ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons

... the firm of Fink and Becker went distracted; but I stood to my point. At last we came to a compromise. I went for two years to a business-house in North Germany; then I came here to learn office-work, through which discipline they hope to tame me. So here I am now in a cloister. But it's all in vain. I humor my father by sitting here, but I shall only stay long enough to convince him that I am right, and then I shall take ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag

... the way into the hall, and thence into the cloister-like passage communicating with the "House in the Middle of the Block." I glanced out at the court-yard as we passed a window; it was most ingeniously planned to take the utmost advantage of its limited area. An antique Italian fountain occupied a niche in the opposite wall, ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen

... some who assume the monastic condition only as a pretence, and will upset the ecclesiastical and civil regulations and affairs, and run about without distinction in the cities and want to found cloisters for themselves, the synod therefore has decreed that no one shall build a cloister or house of prayer or erect anywhere without the consent of the bishop of the city; and further, that also the monks of every district and city shall be subject to the bishop, that they shall love peace and quiet and observe the fasts and prayers in the places where they are assigned ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.

... bayonet and ammunition, seeing that everything was accessible and that all ran smoothly. Then the section rigged a blanket between piled arms, and sat down in its shade for a game of cards. That palled after a time, and Mac drew from his knapsack a book, The Cloister and the Hearth, and was soon deep in its pages. Then came lunch, and in the afternoon orders were read, with inspiring messages from the Generals, and a ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie

... the stressful, stormy hours of my most unhappy youth did I not wish that she had preferred the virginal life of the cloister, and thus spared me the heavy burden of an existence which her unholy and mistaken saintliness went so near ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini

... to write and publish a quarto volume in defence of Pantisocracy, in which a variety of arguments would be advanced in defence of his system, too subtle and recondite to comport with conversation. It would then, he said, become manifest that he was not a projector raw from his cloister, but a cool calculating reasoner, whose efforts and example would secure to him and his friends ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle

... with them. One first passes through the magnificent old gatehouse pictured here. Inside is a large grassy space, with the mass of buildings facing one. They are arranged in a quadrangular form, enclosing a grassy cloister garth. On the south side is the refectory, a magnificent hall above some small rooms on the ground floor. It is believed to have been built by Abbot Dovell in the sixteenth century. The roof, of carved walnut, is in a perfect state of preservation. From the ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home

... time in our lives, we have enjoyed the delight of seeing at the house of a friend one of the grand pictures of MURILLO, which was obtained by a distinguished connoisseur at Lima, in 1828, from the cloister of an old convent, where it had hung for countless years in ignoble seclusion. It had probably been brought from Spain during the life-time of the painter, as it is not described by any of his biographers, who have carefully ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various

... indexed lengthy works, he drew up prospectuses for booksellers, and kept his doctrines to himself, as the grave keeps the secrets of the dead. Yet the gay bohemian of intellectual life, the great statesman who might have changed the face of the world, fell as a private soldier in the cloister of Saint-Merri; some shopkeeper's bullet struck down one of the noblest creatures that ever trod French soil, and Michel Chrestien died for other doctrines than his own. His Federation scheme was more dangerous to ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac

... marriage was honorable, and that celibacy was an invention of the priests not warranted by primitive Buddhism. Penance, fasting, prescribed diet, pilgrimages, isolation from society whether as hermits or in the cloister, and generally amulets and charms, are all tabooed by this sect. Monasteries imposing life-vows are unknown within its pale. Family life takes the place of monkish seclusion. Devout prayer, purity, earnestness of ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis

... Portugal's desertion of her cause. Disgusted with a world, in which she had hitherto experienced nothing but misfortune herself, and been the innocent cause of so much to others, she determined to renounce it for ever, and seek a shelter in the peaceful shades of the cloister. She accordingly entered the convent of Santa Clara at Coimbra, where, in the following year, she pronounced the irrevocable vows, which divorce the unhappy subject of them for ever from her species. Two envoys from Castile, Ferdinand de Talavera, ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott

... came not! The heart of the princess beat quicker and quicker with vague apprehension; when a valet, dressed in cloth of silver, trimmed with crimson velvet, approached her carriage precipitately. "Madame," said he, "the archbishop is in the church; he entered by the portal of the cloister; he is already in the sanctuary; the ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving

... discernment; and of discernment Mr. Southey seems to be utterly destitute. His mode of judging is monkish. It is exactly what we should expect from a stern old Benedictine, who had been preserved from many ordinary frailties by the restraints of his situation. No man out of a cloister ever wrote about love, for example, so coldly and at the same time so grossly. His descriptions of it are just what we should hear from a recluse who knew the passion only from the details of the confessional. Almost all his heroes make love either like Seraphim or like cattle. ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

... Time has this year illustrated his march, or object-glass, with a host of images or spectra—that is, woodcuts of head and tail pieces—to suit all tastes—from the mouldering cloister of other days to the last balloon ascent. The Notices of Saints' Days and Holidays, Chronology and Biography, Astronomical and Naturalist's Notices, are edited with more than usual industry; and the poetry, original and selected, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 344 (Supplementary Issue) • Various

... Suevi), Bede (Ecclesiastical History of England), Paulus Diaconus (History of the Lombards), and others. Of the many historians of the middle ages, besides the authors of biographies, chronicles, cloister annals, &c, may be mentioned Haymo, Anastasius, Adam of Bremen, Ordericus Vitalis, Honorius of Autun, Otto of Freising, Vincent of Beauvais ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various

... "In a French cloister, the hours of meals were announced by the ringing of a bell. A favorite cat belonging to the establishment was accustomed, as soon as she heard the summons, to run quickly to the dining hall, ...
— Minnie's Pet Cat • Madeline Leslie

... both more decorative and dignified. On Donatello's pedestal there are two marble reliefs of winged boys holding the general's helmet, badge and cuirass. The reliefs on the monument are copies of the maimed originals now preserved in a dark passage of the Santo cloister. There must be many statues elsewhere, now taken for originals, which are nothing more than replicas of what had gradually perished. If one closely examines the sculpture on some of the church facades—Siena Cathedral, for instance—one ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford

... men's shoes, I trow," muttered father Segrim, with a sour look at the lads, as he led them through the outer court, where some fine horses were being groomed, and then across a second court surrounded with a beautiful cloister, with flower beds in front of it. Here, on a stone bench, in the sun, clad in a gown furred with rabbit skin, sat a decrepit old man, both his hands clasped over his staff. Into his deaf ears their guide shouted, "These boys say they are ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... three accidental cases I will run briefly through a few others. Thus, certain sceptics wrote that the great crime of Christianity had been its attack on the family; it had dragged women to the loneliness and contemplation of the cloister, away from their homes and their children. But, then, other sceptics (slightly more advanced) said that the great crime of Christianity was forcing the family and marriage upon us; that it doomed women to the drudgery of their homes and children, and ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton

... thousand prayers in discord rise From church and cloister dim, When will we cease our feeble cries, And trust the world to Him? 'Tis His the broken heart to bind, To heal the serpent's bite, The judge is He of all mankind, And shall He not ...
— War Rhymes • Abner Cosens

... colleagues in the university, became convinced that the monks and nuns ought to leave their cloisters and marry like other people. This was a serious proposition for two reasons. In the first place, those who deserted the cloister were violating an oath which they had voluntarily taken; in the second place, if the monasteries were broken up the problem would present itself of the disposal of the property, which had been given to them by pious persons for the good of their souls, and with the expectation that the monks ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson

... in the cloister attached to the minster, a smooth green square of turf, marked here and there with small flat lozenges of stone, bearing the date and initials of those who lay there, and many of them recording former generations ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge

... digging deep, where monks do sleep, beneath yon cloister shrined, That coffin old, within the mould, it was my chance to find; The costly carvings of the lid I scraped full carefully, In hope to get at name or date, yet nothing could ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth

... scarcely more needful to each other, or more united. But—a hacking cough—a hectic cheek—a wasting frame, were to blue-eyed Mary the remorseless harbingers of death, and Eustace, standing on her early grave, was in heart a widower: henceforth he had no aim in life; the cloister was—so thought he, as many do—his best refuge, to dream upon the past, to soothe his present sorrows, and earn for a future world the pleasures lost in this. Time, the best anodyne short of what Eustace could not buy ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... militia and police; the mystery of Christ's presence in the Eucharist was made an engine of the priesthood; the dreams of Paradise and Purgatory gave value to her pardons, interdictions, jubilees, indulgences, and curses. In the Church the spirit of the cloister and the spirit of the world found neutral ground, and to the practical accommodation between these hostile elements she owed her wide supremacy. The Christianity she formed and propagated was different from that of the New Testament, inasmuch as it had taken ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds

... etc. The deeds done there were such as were designated by the Roman law as committed vi, clam, et precario—by force, in secret, and for a short time. Once in, an occupant remained there till the master of the house decreed his or her release. They were gilded oubliettes, savouring both of the cloister and the harem. Their staircases twisted, turned, ascended, and descended. A zigzag of rooms, one running into another, led back to the starting-point. A gallery terminated in an oratory. A confessional was grafted ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo

... the era of deepest intellectual gloom, philosophy was at an entire stand-still. Light arises with the 8th, when we are introduced to the Cathedral and Cloister Schools of Charlemagne; and the 9th saw these schools fully established, and an educational reform completed that was to be productive of lasting good results. But the range of instruction was still narrow, scarcely ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain

... were almost sure to bring to their custodians great wealth. It is said that when the body of St. Sebastian, which was legitimately obtained from Rome, together with the purloined remains of St. Gregory, reached the cloister of Soissons, so great was the crowd of invalids who were cured, and so generous were they in their donations, that the monks actually counted eighty measures of money and one hundred pounds in coin. The great value of such objects may be calculated when it is remembered ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten

... the labyrinths of doubt and contradiction, is the pinnacle of faith he would reach. And often in this labyrinthic gloom, where a gleam of light from some recess of thought or fancy reveals here a Hermit in his cloister, there an Artist in his studio, below a Nawab in his orgies, above a Broker on the Stock Exchange, we have paused to ask a question about these glaring contrarieties in his life and thought. And always would he make this reply: "I have frequently ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani

... besides its magnificent scale. Previous colleges had grown; at New College everything was organized from the first. As the great architectural History of Cambridge says: "For the first time, chapel, hall, library, treasury, the Warden's lodgings, a sufficient range of chambers, the cloister, the various domestic offices, are provided for and erected without change of plan." The chapel especially gave the model for the T shape, a choir and transepts without a nave, which has become the normal form in Oxford. The influence of Wykeham's building plan may be traced elsewhere also—at ...
— The Charm of Oxford • J. Wells

... and made many improvements. His memory is cherished in Russia. He compiled a set of instructions for his sons, from which we may judge of his character. Among other remarks, he says: "It is neither by fasting, nor solitude, nor the life in a cloister that will procure for you the life eternal,—it is doing good. Do not forget the poor but feed them. Do not bury your wealth in the bosom of the earth, for that is contrary to the precepts of Christianity. Be a father to orphans, judge the cause of ...
— The Story of Russia • R. Van Bergen

... knight was the literature of the cloister. There is a considerable body of religious writing in early English, consisting of homilies in prose and verse, books of devotion, like the Ancren Riwle (Rule of Anchoresses), 1225; the Ayenbite of Inwyt (Remorse of Conscience), 1340, both in prose; the ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers



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



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