"Seclusion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... influence made his fidelity to waver; but Olympias having been poisoned in the sacramental bread by the agency of Pharandcem, the former wife of Arsaces, another change took place in Armenian politics unfavorable to the Christian interest. The patriarch Narses retired from the impious court to a safe seclusion. Yet Pharandsem was equally hostile to the Persian influence, and Arsaces began to support with vigor the cause of Julian. He made an inroad into the Persian dominions with a body of Rans and Alans as auxiliaries; wasted Aderbidgan and Sapor, who had been defeated near Tauriz, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... the supply. We should not even be guilty of accosting a friend from over the way lest in consequence he take more steps than otherwise he would do, thus wearing out more shoe-leather. He who would practise such absurd sansculottism as this would have to resort to the severest seclusion, and plainly enough we cannot approve of such fanaticism. By turning antinomian when necessary and staying amongst our fellows, making known our views according to our ability and opportunity, we shall be doing more towards establishing ...
— No Animal Food - and Nutrition and Diet with Vegetable Recipes • Rupert H. Wheldon
... plants known only to suburban haberdashers; others appeared boldly in caps of the pork-pie order, adorned with cherry-coloured streamers, clumps of feathers that had never seen a bird, bunches of shining fruits, or coins that looked as if they had just emerged from the seclusion of the poor-box. Thread gloves abounded, and were mostly in what saleswomen call "the loud shades"—bright scarlet, marigold yellow, grass green or acute magenta. Mittens, too, were visible covered with cabalistic inscriptions ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... telling a story of the Paronsina, or indeed any story at all, I might suffer myself to enlarge somewhat upon the daily order of her secluded life, and show how the seclusion of other Venetian girls was the widest liberty as compared with hers; but I have no right to play with the reader's patience in a performance that can promise no excitement of incident, no charm of invention. Let him figure to himself, ...
— A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories • William D. Howells
... tasks which would have devolved upon the Queen, or in earlier days have been performed with such fidelity and care by the Prince Consort. At this time the Queen was living in strict retirement and for a long period still to follow she maintained the same sorrowing seclusion in a more or less modified form. Toward the close of 1865 the death of Lord Palmerston removed a statesman in whom the Prince had found a personal friend and whom he had consulted and greatly trusted in private matters. In February, 1866, the Queen made one of her rare public appearances ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... spread the news of its untimely end as a warning to all those who, by sign of hand or word of mouth or thought of brain, should desire to do harm to thy mistress. And even shall thou tell me how yon dead beast came to be prowling in the seclusion of thy ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... west. The organ began to drone and murmur, the censers swung and smoked, the candle-flames flared and attracted the bats that lived among the rafters overhead. Buelna knelt before the Mother Superior. She was pale and a little thin from fasting and the seclusion of the cells. But, try as she would, she could not keep her thoughts upon the solemn office in which she was so important a figure. Other days came back to her. A little girl gay and free once more, she romped through the hallways and kitchen of the ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... She had already suggested that madness was the real reason of the seclusion of the tenants at the Warren. Cashel saw the glance, and intercepted it by turning to her and saying, with an attempt at ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... oddly enough, that the Alderlings were as kinless as they were childless, and if he had gone to Europe he would have taken her with him, and prolonged their seclusion by the isolation in which people necessarily live in a foreign country. I found I was the only acquaintance who had visited them during the years of their retirement on the coast, where they had stayed, partly through his inertia, and partly from his ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells
... awful enough, however, here. But in carrying a city by storm, which takes place usually at an unexpected time, and often in the night, the maddened and victorious assaulter suddenly burst into the sacred scenes of domestic peace, and seclusion, and love—the very worst of men, filled with the worst of passions, stimulated by the resistance they have encountered, and licensed by their victory to give all these passions the fullest and most unrestricted gratification. ...
— Alexander the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... consistently beautiful, of all the Exposition courts. No other is so clearly complete in itself, without the intrusion of features from surrounding buildings and courts. No other has the same effect of cloistered seclusion partly because each of the others is open on one side. And certainly no other indicates so clearly the touch of the artist, of the poet-architect, from the organic structural plan to the finest bit of detail. ...
— An Art-Lovers guide to the Exposition • Shelden Cheney
... too momentous to be readily relinquished. My curiosity and my fears likewise were awakened. The marks of violence, which I had seen on the closets and cabinets below, seemed to indicate the presence of plunderers. Here was one who laboured for seclusion and concealment. ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... waterfall which bounds the view as it leaps down the lofty cliffs, the abundant shade of tamarind and palm, and the gorgeous flowering shrubs, suggest nothing artificial or conventionalised in the deep seclusion of the fairy glen. Tall bamboos mirror fluffy foliage and white or golden stems in stream and pool. Orchids of the Brazils festoon unknown trees with the rose and purple butterflies formed by their brilliant blossoms, and colossal traveller's palms, so-called from the draught ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... your tone would not be a distinction for one reared in a court, and speaking only the language she has learned. In you it is a merit very real and very rare. You have brought it from the seclusion of a province, where you met no one who could teach you. You were, in this regard, as perfect the day after your arrival at Paris as you are today. You found yourself, from the first, as free, as little out of place in the most ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... went up from the orchestra stalls, mingled with many others. The seclusion and retirement in which he had taken refuge for the past few days had left him in ignorance of the public exasperation in his regard, the sermons, the dithyrambs with which the newspapers were filled on the subject of his corrupting wealth, articles written ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... boy was without confidant or friend. Serious and eager, he came through school and college, and moved among a crowd of the indifferent, in the seclusion of his shyness. He grew up handsome, with an open, speaking countenance, with graceful, youthful ways; he was clever, he took prizes, he shone in the Speculative Society. It should seem he must become ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... caused so much misery and suffering as leprosy. The banishment from all friends and relatives, the confiscation of property and seclusion from the world, coupled with poverty and brutality of treatment,—all emphasize its physical horror a thousandfold. As to the leper himself, no more graphic description can be given than that printed in The Ninteenth Century, August, ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... and profit by it. Cold houses, coarse food unskilfully cooked, long winters, harsh springs, however favorable to the heroism of the stomach, the lungs, and the spirits, are not found conducive to longevity. In like manner, monotony, seclusion, lack of variety and of social stimulus lower the tone of humanity, drive to sensual pleasures and secret vices, and nourish a miserable pack of mean and degrading immoralities, of which scandal, gossip, backbiting, tale-bearing are the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... possible, she hastened back to the seclusion of her own room. The next day she was examined, and assigned to her place in the different classes, and to the surprise of all, she was far in advance of those ...
— The King's Daughter and Other Stories for Girls • Various
... no occasional assemblies for the purpose of dancing and of exercising themselves in feats of activity which, in Europe, are attended with the happy effects of shaking off the gloom and melancholy that a life of constant labour or seclusion from society is apt to promote. They have not even a fixed day of rest set apart for religious worship. Their acts of devotion partake of the same solitary cast that prevails in their domestic life. In none of the different sects ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... innovation—and has become a part of the landscape, like the trees that have grown up around it. Originally painted brown, with the flight of time it has taken a grayish tinge, as if in sympathy with its venerable proprietor. It stands back from the roadway, and in summer has an air of modest seclusion. Elms, maples, and shrubbery give to the passer-by but chance glimpses of the wide veranda, which is indicated, rather than revealed, ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... at Stonegate had taught Ruth more of her own frailties and weaknesses, and had shown her more of the various sorts of people of which the world is composed, than she would have learnt in a whole year spent in the quiet sheltered seclusion of her ...
— Ruth Arnold - or, the Country Cousin • Lucy Byerley
... Wadsworth and young Bennett very much feared the approach of other suitors, it was quite needless, for the girls were best pleased with the first who had sought them and drawn them forth from their seclusion. ...
— Edna's Sacrifice and Other Stories - Edna's Sacrifice; Who Was the Thief?; The Ghost; The Two Brothers; and What He Left • Frances Henshaw Baden
... my dear prince, for I come to take you out of prison—to open your cage for you. I had begged you to submit to a brief seclusion, entirely for your ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... lines, Merezhkovsky must have forgotten that Tolstoy, in proclaiming his ideas on religion and humanity, prepared himself, not for Epicurean pleasures, but for seclusion in one of the terrible dungeons of a Russian monastery (now in disuse) under the persecutions of a temporal and secular authority, and it was not his fault that, by a sort of miracle, he ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... instincts by shutting them callously under boxes despite pecks and loud protests. Later, when their mood refused to change, she loved to prepare them soft nests in boxes, and to imprison them there until they took kindly to their seclusion. Then it was hard work to wait three weeks until the first fluffy heads peeped out from the angry mother's wing, after which Norah was a blissfully adoring caretaker until the downy balls began to get ragged, as the first wing and tail feathers showed. Then the chicks became uninteresting, and were ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce
... sufficient. I always feared the effect of the low society of this place on you both, and in especial on you, Mabel. My fears have been justified by the results. As soon as Loftus's wedding is over we will return to our seclusion, ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... monasteries, where rigid discipline and active duties allow only the thoughts to ramble to that society which never has been intended to be abandoned, the passions are naturally impelled towards that world, whose temptations are so much increased by long and unnatural seclusion. ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... Catholic faith with my mother's milk, I was well brought up, and neither in word nor in deed did I, I think, show any sign of being a Morisco. To accompany these virtues, for such I hold them, my beauty, if I possess any, grew with my growth; and great as was the seclusion in which I lived it was not so great but that a young gentleman, Don Gaspar Gregorio by name, eldest son of a gentleman who is lord of a village near ours, contrived to find opportunities of seeing me. How he saw me, how we met, how his heart was lost to ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... spirits was such, that lie feared a residence at his house would be little agreeable to his kinsman; and Mr. Forester conceived that this was a disqualification which would always augment in proportion as it was tolerated, and hoped that his society, by inducing Mr. Falkland to suspend his habits of seclusion, would be the means of essential benefit. Mr. Falkland opposed him no further. He would have been sorry to be thought unkind to a kinsman for whom he had a particular esteem; and the consciousness of not ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... they wandered they came to a part where seemed to be only small houses and mews. Presently they found themselves in a little lane with no thoroughfare, at the back of some stables, and had to return along the rough-paved, neglected way. Such was the quiet and apparent seclusion of the spot, that it struck Franks they had better find its most sheltered corner, in which to sit down and rest awhile, possibly sleep. Scarcely would policeman, he thought, enter such a forsaken place! The same moment they heard the measured tread of the enemy on the other ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... given the same sullen answer to every visitor for four weeks, shutting herself up in stern seclusion, determined that, whatever cruel comments they made, the neighbourhood should have no power of spying into the mystery of "that poor Mrs. Locke Harper who did not live happy with her husband." For so she felt sure had been the result of that ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... should dare to write to him about the wife that had been taken away from him! In spite of all her faults her name was so holy to him that it had never once passed his lips since her death, except in low whispers to himself,—low whispers made in the perfect, double-guarded seclusion of his own chamber. "Cora, Cora," he had murmured, so that the sense of the sound and not the sound itself had come to him from his own lips. And now this woman wrote to him about her freely, as though there were nothing sacred, no ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... always had under her pillow 'n' gone up attic to see what trunks they fitted. Mrs. Macy had to holler him down; 'n', my! but he was snappy. He said, 'Ask Dr. Brown,' 'n' then he clumb straight back up his ladder; 'n' Dr. Brown said 's she died o' the complete seclusion of her aspirational 'n' bronchoid tubes. I could see 't the newspaper man did n't know how to spell it, 'n' he told young Dr. Brown any such doin's 'd squeeze the cod-liver oil over into next week, which could n't be considered for a minute. 'N' then he went on to say ...
— Susan Clegg and Her Neighbors' Affairs • Anne Warner
... devote himself to the wandering ladies when they came. They had never met; the poor man didn't care to have his quiet invaded by strange women, and to do the honours of London is no small task: yet this heroic gentleman obeyed orders without a murmur; and, leaving his artistic seclusion, shouldered his burden with the ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... citizens. In time of peace the later Greeks are weaponless men, not surrounded by and entertaining throngs of armed retainers, like the Homeric chief. The women of later Greece, moreover, are in the background of life, dwelling in the women's chambers, behind those of the men, in seclusion. The Homeric women also, at least in the house of Odysseus, have their separate chambers, which the men seem not to enter except on invitation, though the ladies freely honour by their presence the hall of the warriors. The circumstances, however, were peculiar— Penelope being ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... crime was that they were believed to have expressed approval of Britain's policy in dealing with Moslem races. Thus were the people terrorised. They knew the Turkish ideas of justice, and dared not talk of events happening in the town even in the seclusion of their homes. The evils of war, as war is practised by the Turk, left a mark on Jerusalem's population which will be indelible for this generation, despite the wondrous change our Army has ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... an errand which would take him within the house, to see if by chance Lady Varia might be among the feasters. Since she was kept in strictest seclusion by Eudemius, he was quite sure of not finding her, but his mood of perversity still held. On the way he met a Saxon slave, Wardo, a fair-haired, blue-eyed fellow, hurrying toward the atrium with a pierced ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... retirement against impertinent curiosity. She rarely or never allowed herself to be seen; Lord Mountjoy, with an official retinue, was in attendance in the house; but the occupation was not a pleasant one, and he was as willing to respect the queen's seclusion as she to remain secluded. Injunctions arrived however from the court at the end of June, which compelled him to request an interview; a deputation of the privy council had come down to inform the ex-queen of the orders of the government, and to desire that they might be put in force in her own family. ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... come to Washington. Soon afterward the Duke's younger brother, the Prince de Joinville, came to this country, and refused to recognize her, which virtually excluded her from reputable society. For some years subsequently she resided in luxurious seclusion with a wealthy citizen of New York, in the interior of that State, and after his death ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... solitude and obscurity of a small market town. But this does not appear to have been the case. General society, for which indeed he was not particularly suited, was not much to his taste; and during every period of his life, he always looked forward to a state of complete retirement and seclusion in the country, as the object and end of all his labours. He had great enjoyment however in his own domestic circle, and in the society of select friends; and his residence at Peebles was, in this respect, highly fortunate for him, since it was the occasion of his becoming acquainted ...
— The Journal Of A Mission To The Interior Of Africa, In The Year 1805 • Mungo Park
... high divides with their eagle eye peeled for any one who looked like a whisky-runner. And whenever they did locate a man with the contraband in his possession, that gentleman was due to have his outfit confiscated and get a chance to ponder the error of his ways in the seclusion of a Mounted Police guardhouse if he didn't make an ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... the adobe house, squat like the "ketch-all" but larger. There was a hole alongside the fireplace chimney at the end next the hill, and sometimes when Compadre was especially disenchanted with his world, he went into the hole and nursed his grievances in dark seclusion under the house. ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... covered with black paper. This much, Pant discovered at once. The rest he left to the seclusion of his pup tent and the light of ...
— Panther Eye • Roy J. Snell
... short time they were at the place where Tom and the others had built the shack. The ruins of the airship were examined with interest, and the two women took advantage of the seclusion of the little hut, to get some much needed rest until ...
— Tom Swift and his Wireless Message • Victor Appleton
... domestic relations. Unlike the people of other nations, his grief is loud but lasting, vehement but deep; and whilst its shadow has been chequered by the laughter and mirth of a cheerful disposition, still in the moments of seclusion, at his bedside prayer, or over the grave of those he loved, it will put itself forth after half a life with a vivid power of recollection which is sometimes almost ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... alone to blame for this, but also the world which first tempts and then reproves him. Goethe says, that, if a person once does a good thing, society forms a league to prevent his doing another. His seclusion is gone, and therefore his unconsciousness and his leisure; luxuries tempt him from his frugality, and soon he must toil for luxuries; then, because he has done one thing well, he is urged to squander himself ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... life of the Big House went on in its frictionless way. Dick worked. Graham worked. Paula maintained her seclusion. The sages from the madrono grove strayed in for wordy dinners—and wordy evenings, except when Paula played for them. Automobile parties, from Sacramento, Wickenberg, and other valley towns, continued to ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... Gottlieb when he had retired to the seclusion of his inner office, "that you fully understand that the divorce secured by your wife is inoperative—Tut! Tut! Don't interrupt me!"—for Hawkins had opened his mouth in protest—"for the reason —for the very good reason, I repeat—that you were never served with any summons or notified that the ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... away from us; and yet it was in that day that Victor Hugo lived as a child in the old convent of the Feuillantines so graphically described in "Les Miserables." Here he and his two brothers lived with their mother in the strictest seclusion, while the father, General Hugo, a soldier of the Empire, was off with the Grand Army at some distant point, either in garrison or in the field. The child, who was afterwards to hold Napoleon the Little up to the execration of the world, felt his earliest emotions of patriotism ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... goose pass on to the north, and watched the green grass creeping up the sunny slopes. I answered the splendid challenge of the loitering crane, and studied the ground sparrow building her grassy nest. The prairie hens began to seek seclusion in the swales, and the pocket gopher, busily mining the sod, threw up his purple-brown mounds of cool fresh earth. Larks, blue-birds and king-birds followed the robins, and at last the full tide of May covered ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... shelter in this world, and who must nevertheless appeal to it, exact things from it, contemn it, and still be unable to dispense with the thing contemned, —this really constitutes the wretchedness of the artist of the future, who, unlike the philosopher, cannot prosecute his work alone in the seclusion of a study, but who requires human souls as messengers to this future, public institutions as a guarantee of it, and, as it were, bridges between now and hereafter. His art may not, like the philosopher's, be put aboard the boat of written documents: ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Semneh they left them there until their return, the danger and hardships of the desert journey being too great for them to encounter, and it was therefore thought advisable that the girls should remain in seclusion. ...
— The Cat of Bubastes - A Tale of Ancient Egypt • G. A. Henty
... writer engaged in congenial literary activities in a private retreat. We see this period marked by the creation of some of the most virile passages of a Work dealing exclusively in red corpuscles and huge primal impulses. We see this thoughtful man dragged from his calm seclusion to a horrifying publicity; forced to adopt the stage and, himself a writer, compelled to exploit the repulsive sentiments of an author not only personally distasteful to him but whose whole method and school in ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... in such a 'Palace of Art' that Des Esseintes would recreate his already over-wrought body and brain, and the monotony of its seclusion is only once broken by a single excursion into the world without. This one episode of action, this one touch of realism, in a book given over to the artificial, confined to a record of sensation, is a projected voyage to London, a voyage that never ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... too much over the sad fate of a young Chinaman compelled to marry one whom he has never seen, for indeed there seems little difference between the young ladies of China. Thousands of years of seclusion, of unvarying customs, have at last moulded women into the same form, mentally and physically, and anything like individuality can exist only to a small degree, and in exceptional natures. They are as ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... conversation and the minuteness of his knowledge, in everything which depended upon acuteness of observation and exactness of recollection. I remember, too, being somewhat startled, coming as I did from the seclusion of a country life, with a certain emphatic frankness in his manner, which, however, I came at last to like and to admire. The club met in the hotel called Washington Hall, the site of which, is now occupied by part of the circuit of Stewart's ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... feel one has not come to the end, one must go on and on in search of new beauties and the hidden delights we feel sure must be behind the clipped hedges or the trellis walls. Even when we come to the end we are not quite sure it is the end, and we steep ourselves in seclusion and quiet, knowing full well that to-morrow or to-night perhaps when the moon is up and we come back as we promise ourselves to do, surely we shall see that ideal corner that is the last word ...
— The House in Good Taste • Elsie de Wolfe
... know all that. Tell me what the news is!' broke in Wilhelmine impatiently. The Duchess's entire seclusion was well known to her, she heard it discussed by her ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... Honora was able to gain her own room, but even seclusion, though preferable to the companionship of her guests, was almost intolerable. The tragedy of Mrs. Rindge had served—if such a thing could be—to enhance her own; a sudden spectacle of a woman in a more advanced stage of desperation. Would she, Honora, ever become like that? Up to the present ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... their very best words, they must show that they have beautiful minds; and they will do so, I swear they will, in the tournament, which will not be on the meadow—no; too many cows there, and too many washers of clothes—but in seclusion, in the class-room of that brave man called the Bulldog. It will be a battle," concluded the Count with enthusiasm, "of heads: and the best head, that head will ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... boasting, at some former period, a majestic stone cross, now of course defaced, and the very square it stood upon moss-grown and in ruins. The church itself is a plain quiet structure, but the sylvan beauty and peaceful seclusion of the situation cannot be surpassed. We measured the great yews, and several of them were twenty-four or twenty-five feet in circumference at four feet from the ground. There were some graves enclosed in railings, and surrounded ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... visited her in Ferrara, in 1536, and ended by corrupting her mind and seducing her into his own errors, which produced discord between her and her religious husband, and resulted in his placing her in temporary seclusion, in order to attempt her conversion. Hence, the chapel is faced with marble, paneled in relief, and studied to avoid giving place to saints or images, which were disapproved by the almost Anabaptist doctrines of Calvin, then fatally ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... to be very regular at the morning service, hoping that the odor of sanctity with which they would thus be permeated would in some way atone for the absence of genuine heart-religion and last them for the remainder of the year. First, however, and as a means of helping her in her intended seclusion from the world, Mrs. Howard was to give the largest party of the season—a sort of carnival, from which the revelers were expected to retire the moment the silvery-voiced clock on her mantel struck the hour of twelve and ushered in the dawn of Lent. It was to be a masquerade, ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... was rapidly spreading to all parts of the classical world, and the fundamental principles of the Jewish religion were steadily gaining appreciation and active adherence, this intense desire for seclusion may at first glance seem curious. But the phenomenon is perfectly simple. A foremost factor was national feeling, enhanced to a tremendous degree at the time of the destruction of Jerusalem. Lacking a political basis, it was transferred to religious ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... her dress disordered, the hands she tremblingly held out bore discolored marks. Wade led her into the seclusion of the willow trail. ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... had been taken prisoner, he was sent to Washington and the largest cities of the seaboard, that he might be convinced how utterly useless it was for him to contend against fate. It was enough, and the terrible warrior returned to the seclusion of his wilderness home, while the scepter of his chieftainship was given to ...
— Autobiography of Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak, or Black Hawk • Black Hawk
... she was the image of her mother. The bright eyes, sweet, loving face, and happy voice of little Rachel, that was heard all day long, lightened the mother's toil, refreshed her spirits, and often made her forget the loneliness and seclusion in which they lived. She was like a cool spring in the desert, a bright flower in a barren waste, a ray of sunshine from a ...
— Lizzy Glenn - or, The Trials of a Seamstress • T. S. Arthur
... thus brought to a triumphant conclusion of good will. And the next morning, of course, is Boxing Day—a most appropriately named event. Even if fighting isn't strictly legal, backbiting unfortunately is. Still, the wise relation seeks the frequent seclusion of his own bedroom during that mostly inglorious day of Christmas aftermath. You see, there is no knowing what sparks may fly when the digestions of a devoted family ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... Sam began to shout for aid in every key possible to the human voice. Such hoots and howls, whistles and roars, never woke the echoes of the lonely marsh before, or scared the portly frog who resided there in calm seclusion. ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott
... conclusions, Guenzburg arrived only after a long, severe, though silent, struggle in the seclusion of his closet. His active mind would not at first surrender unconditionally to the coercion of custom. But his conception of ceremonialism served him in good stead on many an occasion in his eventful life. Being an expedient to preserve harmony, it may and must vary with change of conditions. ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... impulse was to retreat to the safe seclusion of her own room. But, even as she arose to her feet, she knew how that would hurt the man who had always been so good to her; and so she went generously down the walk to meet him where he would dismount ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... scenes of courtly splendour and warlike adventures, of which the followers of Sir Halbert used to boast on their occasional visits to Avenel, to the wonderment and envy of those who, like Roland, knew courts and camps only by hearsay, and were condemned to the solitary sports and almost monastic seclusion of Avenel, surrounded by its lonely lake, and embossed among its pathless mountains. "They shall mention my name," he said to himself, "if the risk of my life can purchase me opportunities of distinction, and Catherine Seyton's saucy eye shall rest with more respect on the ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... in her eighty-seventh year—used, in days long gone by, to gather round her table many of the wits and celebrities of fifty years ago; but for her, as for myself, our little country home has been as dear for its seclusion as for the charm of ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... casual, that he neglected Miss Bernardstone most flagrantly, and had quite resumed his old intimacy with Lady Vandeleur. I don't exactly know what was meant by this, for she spent the first three months of her widowhood in complete seclusion, in her own old house in Norfolk, where he certainly was not staying with her. I believe he stayed some time, for the partridge shooting, at a place a few miles off. It came to my ears that if Miss Bernardstone did n't take the hint it was because she was determined to stick to him ...
— The Path Of Duty • Henry James
... days after my return to Washington I remained in seclusion, so as to avoid any possibility of unpleasant incidents. Those Germans who live in the congenial surroundings of their homes can have little conception of the hostility with which we in America had to contend. ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff
... ten o'clock in the morning, accompanied by clerks who were laden with books, inventories and rolls of manuscript. The study had been selected for the meeting, both on account of its seclusion from the rest of the house and because it contained an immense table which would serve for the voluminous documents, all of which must be examined and verified. San Giacinto himself awaited the arrival of the Saracinesca ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... repented her impulsive act. She had intrusted her secret to another. Would that other prove loyal? A faint shiver crept down her spine, and she pressed one mitted hand over the other. "I seek seclusion, monsieur, because—I ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... found the cabaret set, a gilded haunt of pleasure with small tables set about an oblong of dancing floor. Back of these on three sides were raised platforms with other tables, and above these discreet boxes, half masked by drapery, for the seclusion of more retiring merry-makers. The scene was deserted as yet, but presently he was joined by another early comer, a beautiful young woman of Spanish type with a thin face and eager, dark eyes. Her gown was glistening black set low about her polished shoulders, and she carried a red rose. ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... its bad manners only because they are better than no manners at all. But the university will always exist in some form as a community of persons desirous of pushing their culture to the highest pitch they are capable of, not as solitary students reading in seclusion, but as members of a body of individuals all pursuing culture, talking culture, thinking culture, above all, criticizing culture. If such persons are to read and talk and criticize to any purpose, they must know the world outside the university at least as well as the shopkeeper in the High Street ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... had not thought much of such old-fashioned names as Harriet and Sarah for some years past in our village, and it seemed rather odd taste in these city people. We considered Hattie and Sadie much prettier. Generally the Harriets and Sarahs endured only in the seclusion of the family Bible and the baptismal records. Quite a number of the ladies had met Mrs. Jameson, having either called at Mrs. Liscom's and seen her there, or having spoken to her at church; and as for Grandma Cobb, she had had time to visit nearly every house in ...
— The Jamesons • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Franciscan and Dominican orders of about the same time, which turned to preaching. The Windesheimians and the Hieronymians (as the brethren of the Common Life were also called) exerted their crowning activities in the seclusion of the schoolroom and the silence of the writing cell. The schools of the brethren soon drew pupils from a wide area. In this way the foundations were laid, both here in the northern Netherlands and in lower Germany, for a generally diffused culture among the middle ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... pages there are, it is true, occasional lapses from a perfectly sound method; there is at times a loss of simplicity, a cloying sweetness in the style of this accomplished writer. These are, however, the perils of a very sensitive temperament, an intense feeling for beauty, and a certain seclusion from the affairs of life. That which characterises Mr. Pater at all times is his power of putting himself amid conditions that are not only extinct, but obscure and elusive; of winding himself back, as it were, into the primitive Greek consciousness and recovering ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... I am indebted to Inspector Forrest, who, some six months after our famous ride together in pursuit of the pirate, managed to find time to pay a flying visit to our Norfolk home, where we had continued to dwell in peaceful seclusion. ...
— The Motor Pirate • George Sidney Paternoster
... simplicity with an intense regard for the effect on himself. He is—in spite of his seclusion—above all a prophet amongst men. He made great discoveries in the realm of the mind—the mind attending closely to Nature, but he is too much the naturalist and the land-surveyor to lose himself in the raptures of nature love. He is a stranger to the ethereal touch ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... to such men as Yoshida and his soldier-follower. The violence of the ministerial Tarquin only served to direct attention to the illegality of his master's rule; and people began to turn their allegiance from Yeddo and the Shogun to the long- forgotten Mikado in his seclusion at Kioto. At this juncture, whether in consequence or not, the relations between these two rulers became strained; and the Shogun's minister set forth for Kioto to put another affront upon the rightful sovereign. The circumstance was well fitted to precipitate events. It was a piece of ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... push and pressure of daily living. If the prophets ever withdrew to solitude, they did not retire to closets, but rather to deserts or to mountains. We must not allow our modern familiarity with bookmaking as an affair of library research and tranquil meditation in seclusion to mislead us into thinking that the Christian Bible was wrought out in similar fashion. The Book is full of the tingle and even the roar of the life out of which it was born. Jesus gathered up in a single sentence the process by which the scriptural revelation ...
— Understanding the Scriptures • Francis McConnell
... not belong anywhere! It has no belongings about it! At this moment it is absolutely more retired and shut out from communication with the civilized world than Hawaii or any of the other islands of the Pacific sea. In seclusion and remoteness, New Mexico may press hard on the character and condition of Typee. And its people are infinitely less elevated, in morals and condition, than the people of the Sandwich Islands. We had much better have Senators ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... reaching forward for the handle of his carriage, "go down to the Tower. It is just possible that a few days' seclusion might be good ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... draughty bala-khana to the stable, and send the shagird-chapar out in quest of camel-thorn, bread, eggs, and pomegranates, thinking thus to obtain the luxury of a bit of fire and something to eat in comparative seclusion. This vain hope proves that I have not even yet become thoroughly acquainted with the Persians. No sooner does my camel-thorn blaze begin to crackle and the smoke to betray the whereabouts of a fire, than shivering, blue-nosed ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... they call on men to leave it, not to improve it. To them God and the world are in opposition, "the world, the flesh, and the devil" are the three great enemies of the spiritual life. In the West, this is almost universal, for in the Roman Catholic Church seclusion is the mark of the religious life, and "the religious" are the monk and the nun, the "religious" and the "secular" being in opposition. In truth, where the realisation of God outside himself is sought by the devotee, ...
— The Basis of Morality • Annie Besant
... run."—"No, Doctor! I cannot hold out long under this frightful climate."—"Your excellent constitution is proof against its pernicious effects."—"It once did not yield to the strength of mind with which nature has endowed me, but the transition from a life of action to a complete seclusion has ruined all. I have grown fat, my energy is gone, the bow is unstrung." Antommarchi did not try to combat an opinion but too well-founded, but diverted the conversation to another subject. "I resign ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... dreadfully wounded by Judge Terry, was, for a long time, considered desperate by the eminent surgeons and physicians in constant attendance upon him. But after long hovering between life and death; to the astonishment of all, he began slowly to recover, until, at length, after many weeks of seclusion and intense suffering, in the early part of August, he was able again to make his appearance upon the streets. And now that his recovery was assured, the question as to the disposition to be made of the author of his dreadful ...
— A Sketch of the Causes, Operations and Results of the San Francisco Vigilance Committee of 1856 • Stephen Palfrey Webb
... entry of souls into other bodies. As a proof of this belief he speaks of the practice of burning and burying with the dead things appropriate to the needs of the living. Lucan, the Latin poet, in his Pharsalia, refers to the seclusion of the Druids' groves and to their doctrine of immortality. The Scholiasts' notes on this passage are after the manner of their kind, and add very little to our knowledge. In Pliny's Natural History (xvi, 249), however, we seem to be face ...
— Celtic Religion - in Pre-Christian Times • Edward Anwyl
... supported himself for a season by doing odd jobs in land surveying for the farmers about Concord. In 1845 he built, with his own hands, a small cabin on the banks of Walden Pond, near Concord, and lived there in seclusion for two years. His expenses during these years were nine cents a day, and he gave an account of his experiment in his most characteristic book, Walden, published in 1854. His Week on the Concord ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... said Flora de Barral under her breath. Without removing his eyes from her he took off his hat. It was a tall hat. The hat of the trial. The hat of the thumb-nail sketches in the illustrated papers. One comes out in the same clothes, but seclusion counts! It is well-known that lurid visions haunt secluded men, monks, hermits—then why not prisoners? De Barral the convict took off the silk hat of the financier de Barral and deposited it on the front seat of the cab. Then he blew ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... up to Billabong three days later, and were met by Jim, who had ridden into Cunjee with Black Billy, and released the motor from inglorious seclusion in the local garage. Billy jogged off, leading Garryowen, and Jim watched them half wistfully for a minute before turning to the car. Motors had their uses certainly; but no Linton ever dreamed of giving a car the serious and respectful consideration ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... Snip-snip (from the "emporium" of Boltwhack & Co.), by Miss Chink-chink, who sits at the receipt of customs in that severely un-French restaurant, the Maison Hash. That the man-about-town has been morally elevated by this Emancipation of Girl from the seclusion of home to that of the "private room" is too obvious for denial. Nothing so uplifts Tyrant Man as the table talk of good young women who earn ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... applause called forth on your lips? That you are secretly pained at the necessity of profaning your art before people of doubtful disinterestedness? (Lulu makes no answer.) That you would gladly exchange at any moment the shimmer of publicity for a quiet, sunny happiness in distinguished seclusion? (Lulu makes no answer.) That you feel in yourself enough dignity and high rank to fetter a man to your feet—in order to enjoy his utter helplessness?... (Lulu makes no answer.) That in a comfortable, richly furnished villa you would feel in a more fitting place than here,—with unlimited ...
— Erdgeist (Earth-Spirit) - A Tragedy in Four Acts • Frank Wedekind
... devotion. All who have journeyed through the narrow and water-worn vineyards and meadows which are washed by the Rhone, ere that river pours its tribute into the Lake of Leman, have seen some such site, occupied by one who has devoted his life to seclusion and the altar, overhanging the village of St. Maurice, in the Canton of le Valais. But there is an air of obtrusiveness in the Swiss hermits age that did not belong to the place of which we write, since the one is perched upon its high and narrow ledge, as if to show the world in what dangerous ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... its wriggling tail. The elbow-shaped lever drew back, till the squirming prize was held close against its captor's face. Then with swift jets from the turbine arrangement of its abdominal gills, the strange monster darted back to a retreat among the weed stems, where it could devour its prey in seclusion. ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... but only with reproaches. Now his resentment was broken. Twice had the dwarfs mischief thrown Marguerite on his compassion, and thereby diminished his resistance to her. Jonas Bronck's hand, in its red-hot seclusion behind the log, writhed and smoked, discharging its grosser parts up the chimney's shaft. Unseen, it lay a wire-like outline of bone; unseen, it became a hand of fairy ashes, trembling in every filmy atom; finally an ember fell upon it, and where a hand ...
— The Lady of Fort St. John • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... took leave of their hostess with thanks and flatteries expressive of highest gratification and admiring delight. Party after party Dane saw to their carriages and bowed off; the house was emptied at last; Mr. Falkirk had betaken himself to the seclusion of his cottage already some time before; and when the afternoon was really darkening, enough to make the glow of the fires within tell in ruddy cheer upon walls and curtains, Dane left the hall door and the latest departure and ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... merely holding glass, and in which their actual use is to give steadiness and tone, as it were, to the arches and walls above and beside them; or to give the idea of protection to those who pass along the triforium, and of seclusion to those who walk in the cloister. Much thicker shafts, and more massy arches, may be properly employed in work of this kind; and many groups of such tracery will be found resolvable into true colonnades, with the arches in pairs, or in triple ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... the maps by its Turkish name of Aladja-Hissar) late at night. He was hospitably received by the Natchalnik, whose wife kissed the visitor's hand on his arrival, in compliance with the old Servian customs, now fast wearing out, which assign to woman a social position intermediate between the seclusion of eastern manners and the graceful precedence which she enjoys in the west. The next morning, they walked out to inspect the town, which was the metropolis of the Servian kingdom immediately before its overthrow by the Turks; and which, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... same high-bred domestic was in waiting to show him into the library. Mr. Darrell was there already, in the simple but punctilious costume of a gentleman who retains in seclusion the habits customary in the world. At the first glance Lionel thought he saw a slight cloud of displeasure on his host's brow. He went up to Mr. Darrell ingenuously, and apologized for the deficiencies of ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... met next morning, they neither looked at nor spoke to each other. Days passed full of depression and gloom for the young wife, who spent most of her time in seclusion, whilst the king sought distraction in the society of his courtiers. The chancellor, after his second interview with the queen, absented himself from court, not wishing to be furthermore drawn into a quarrel which he saw himself powerless to heal. During his absence the king ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... was very still and beautiful, and, the clouds having cleared away, the moonbeams struggled through the foliage and revealed the extreme wildness and seclusion of the spot which had been chosen by the outlaws as ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... it politic to seem to favour. She liked Sidney well, but resented, or appeared to resent, his intrusion of advice; he also was discontented with what seemed to be her policy, and he withdrew from Court for a time. That time of seclusion, after the end of March, 1580, he spent with his sister at Wilton. They versified psalms together; and he began to write for her amusement when she had her baby first upon her hands, his romance of "Arcadia." It was never finished. ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... the Master breathed his last; and the frozen carrion that lay before us was the body of the drunken shoemaker. It was always moving to come upon the theatre of any tragic incident; to come upon it after so many days, and to find it (in the seclusion of a desert) still unchanged, must have impressed the mind of the most careless. And yet it was not that which struck us into pillars of stone; but the sight (which yet we had been half expecting) of Secundra ankle-deep in the grave of his late master. He had cast the main part of his raiment ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... his mind and manners were hurt by the prominence which his life at the Lakes—a life very public, under the name of seclusion—gave, in his own eyes; to his own works and conversation; but he was less absorbed in his own objects, less solemn, less severed from ordinary men than is supposed, and has been given out by strangers, who, to the number of eight hundred in a year, have been received ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... conscious of a deeper demand; as though, to the support of her desires, she had called in my person upon the assurance, even the majesty of the law. I could not justify her breaking of what I instinctively took to be a determined habit of seclusion except by postulating deeper issues than I saw on the surface. There was no reason why I should not revise the document and be done with it; queerer provisions have been made in other wills. Yet, to make the inheritance conditional upon so ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... from too many harmonic harangues. [Isn't this one?] I long for the valley of silence, Edgar Poe's valley, wherein not even a sigh stirred the amber-colored air [or wasn't it saffron-hued? I forget, and Poe is not to be had in this corner of the universe]. Why can't music be read in the seclusion of one's study, in the company of one's heart-beats? Why must we go to the housetop and shout our woes to the universe? The "barbaric yawp" of Walt Whitman, over the roofs of the world, has become fashionable, and from tooting motor-cars to noisy symphonies all is a conspiracy against silence. ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... Sea's faint murmur. In the open air Our Myrtles blossom'd; and across the porch 5 Thick Jasmins twined: the little landscape round Was green and woody, and refresh'd the eye. It was a spot which you might aptly call The Valley of Seclusion! Once I saw (Hallowing his Sabbath-day by quietness) 10 A wealthy son of Commerce saunter by, Bristowa's citizen: methought, it calm'd His thirst of idle gold, and made him muse With wiser feelings: for he paus'd, and look'd With a pleas'd sadness, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... return in the chariot with his lady. She hastened away, to prevent any chat between Sir William and Mr Jones. But, once in the carriage, in all the glory of being surrounded and watched by a number of gaping clowns and shouting boys, she could not resolve to bury herself in the seclusion of the Hall, without enjoying the bustle a little longer. She therefore suddenly discovered that she wanted to order a morning cap at Miss Nares'; and the carriage drew up in state before the milliner's door. Miss Flint, whose hair had come out of curl, from her ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... convents, priests, and papacy,—of which the lawyer was well aware when speaking thus of his sister. Mrs. Bolton was certainly not addicted to papistical observances, nor was she at all likely to recommend the seclusion of her daughter in a convent. All her religious doctrines were those of the Low Church. But she had a tendency to arrive at similar results by other means. She was so afraid of the world, the flesh, and the devil, that she ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... her life and reason, as it had his. She consented, not with the anticipation of spending any portion of her life behind prison-bars, but in order to use the game to amuse her husband during his long periods of forced and speechless seclusion. She would sit by his bedside and play her game, and he took great pleasure in watching it and pointing at the cards that he thought she ought to play. In later years, when he had gone to the other world, and the days grew long and lonely, this game of solitaire, ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... diseases that come to us, for examination and treatment, do so after having tried, without success, treatment by baths, enforced seclusion, as well as unskillfully applied electrical treatment and massage. Prolonged medication has frequently aroused digestive disorders and made the patient hate the sight of the medicine bottle. In such cases our improved methods, as applied in the Institution and also prescribed ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... Powell, the daughter of a Cavalier; and, taking her from the gay life of her father's house, he brought her into a gloom and seclusion almost insupportable. He loved his books better than he did his wife. He fed and sheltered her, indeed, but he gave her no tender sympathy. Then was enacted in his household the drama of the rebellion in miniature; and no doubt his domestic troubles had led to his extended ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... in his lighter branches of knowledge, his family sufficed to itself, and had determined so to continue while abroad. The society of no Continental watering-place has a very good name, and they were there for climate and seclusion. With two ladies, who seemed to occupy the places and estimation of friends, (but who were probably the paid nurse and companion to the invalid,) and a kind-hearted old secretary to Mr. Wangrave, whose duties consisted in being as happy as he could possibly be, their circle ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... the star, the shade of eve, Seclusion, heavenly rest, And calm, for these things interweave The bowers of ...
— Atma - A Romance • Caroline Augusta Frazer |
