"Cowled" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a few there are both of men and of women, who are so foolish as blindly to believe that, so soon as a young woman has been veiled in white and cowled in black, she ceases to be a woman, and is no more subject to the cravings proper to her sex, than if, in assuming the garb and profession of a nun, she had put on the nature of a stone: and if, perchance, they hear of aught that is counter to this their faith, they are ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... solely to the Triune God, to whose service he had reverently dedicated his young life, there were times when in almost ascetic self-abnegation he unconsciously bowed down to that stem-lipped, stony Teraph who, under the name of "Duty," sat a cowled and shrouded idol in the secret oratory of his unselfish heart. Are there not seasons when even the most orthodox wonder whether the Dii Involuti passed away for ever, with the paterae and fibulae that once rendered service in the classic shades ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... pass through my mind like cowled shadows, silent and remote, and disappear. Perhaps they are the ghosts of thoughts that once inhabited the mind of an ancestor. At other times the things I have learned and the things I have been taught, ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... year belong the "Sermons on the Canticles." In the auditorium, or talking-room of the monastery, the abbot, surrounded by his white-cowled monks, delivered his spiritual discourses. A strange company it was: the old, stooping monk and the young beginner, the lord and the peasant, listening together to the man whose message they believed came from ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... share, for the games of the children outside the convent gate. How human, how ineffably full of a good child's longing, is not his vision of Paradise! The gaily-dressed angels are leading the little cowled monks—little baby black and white things, with pink faces like sugar lambs and Easter rabbits—into deep, deep grass quite full of flowers, the sort of grass every child on this wicked earth has been cruelly forbidden to wade in! They fall into those angels' arms, hugging ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... half Europe were craving for, and craving in vain: facts. And so, year after year, was realised that scene which stands engraved in the frontispiece of his great book—where, in the little quaint Cinquecento theatre, saucy scholars, reverend doctors, gay gentlemen, and even cowled monks, are crowding the floor, peeping over each other's shoulders, hanging on the balustrades; while in the centre, over his "subject"—which one of those same cowled monks knew but too well—stands young Vesalius, upright, proud, almost defiant, as one who knows himself safe in the ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... Office as a renegade and an infidel, and this he did one night; it was the night before the day when we should have taken ship. I was sitting with your mother and her mother in their house at Seville, when six cowled men entered and seized me without a word. When I prayed to know their purpose they gave no other answer than to hold a crucifix before my eyes. Then I knew why I was taken, and the women ceased clinging to me ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... in your gloom profound, Ye solemn seats of holy pain! Take me, cowled forms, and fence me round, Till I possess my soul again; Till free my thoughts before me roll, Not ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... from their snug self-devotion were driven, Wistful and fat and slow: looking backward, I fancied them going Out through the sculptured doorway, and down the Ponte de'Frati, Cowled and sandalled and beaded, a plump and pensive procession; And in my day their cells were barracks for Austrian soldiers, Who in their turn have followed the Augustinian Friars. As to the frescos, little remained of work once so perfect. Summer and winter weather ...
— Poems • William D. Howells
... mouldings, zigzag and cable, dog-tooth and parrot-beak, visages human and diabolic, wherewith the Norman builders loved to surround their doorways. The doors were of solid oak, heavily guarded with iron, and from a little wicket in the midst peered out a cowled head, ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... better-known California poets, not quite without result. I was familiar with what seem to me the best of the serious verses of Bret Harte, the lines on San Francisco,—wherein the city is pictured as a penitent Magdalen, cowled in the grey of the Franciscans, —the soft pale grey of the sea fog. The literary value of the figure is hardly injured by the cold fog that the penitence of this particular Magdalen has never been of an enduring quality. It is ...
— The Sea Fogs • Robert Louis Stevenson
... small portico cut in the solid wall, sat a priest, old, bearded, wrinkled, cowled—never being more perfectly eremitish. From the manner of the people present, hardly might one say which was the attraction, the fountain, forever sparkling, or the priest, forever there. He heard, saw, was seen, but never spoke. Occasionally a visitor extended a hand to ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... one of the cowled priests, "are they not criminals? The pharaoh died in the chapel of Osiris, so he must have been in ceremonial costume, while here oh! instead of gold ornaments bronze; the chain is bronze, too, and on his ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... that the sandbank had various attractions all of its own. Three camels laden with stone and in convoy of white-clad figures shuffled down the slope at a picturesque angle. Two cowled women in black, veiled to the eyes in gauze heavily sewn with sequins, barefooted, with massive silver anklets, watched us pass. Hindu workmen in turban and loin-cloth furnished a picturesque note, but did not seem to be injuring themselves by over-exertion. Naked small boys raced us for a short ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... arrow that struck his prince. When, therefore, Prince Edward arrives at the friar's cell and peers into his marvellous crystal, he sees Lacy and Margaret exchanging declarations of love, with Friar Bungay standing by ready to wed them. The power of Friar Bacon prevents the ceremony by whisking his cowled brother away, and the furious prince hurries back to Fressingfield. He is resolved to slay Lacy; nor does that remorseful earl ask for other treatment; Margaret, however, offers so brave and noble a defence of her lover, taking all blame upon herself and avowing that his death will ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... sight, and crept smoothly and noiselessly under the forest shadow of the opposite bank. Another followed, then another, and another and still another in regular interval. Not a sound could be heard. In the distance their occupants gave the illusion of cowled figures,—the Indian women close wrapped in their shawls, dropping their heads modestly or turning them aside as their customs commanded them to do on encountering strangers. Against the evening glow of the reflected sky for a single instant they stood ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... church, I like a cowl, I love a prophet of the soul, And on my heart monastic aisles Fall like sweet strains or pensive smiles, Yet not for all his faith can see Would I that cowled ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... toward heaven, and listen to the hours Chimed by the bells of choirs where Dante prayed. They cease; then lo! the foot of time seems stayed Five hundred years and more, I find me bowers Where sweet and noble ladies weave them flowers For one who reads Boccaccio in the shade. The cowled students halt by two and threes To hear the voice come thrilling through the trees, Then tear themselves away to themes more trite. Anon I mark the diligent hands that turn Unlovely parchment scrolls whereby to learn The beauty ...
— Briefless Ballads and Legal Lyrics - Second Series • James Williams
... Grey-cowled monk, whose faith so earnest Guides these Indians' childlike hearts, As their hands to toil thou turnest, Teaching them the Builder's arts, Speak thy thought! as now they gather Round the white walls on the plain, Rearing them for God the ...
— Memories of Canada and Scotland - Speeches and Verses • John Douglas Sutherland Campbell
... of day Through the chancel shot its ray, Far the glimmering tapers shed Faint light on the cowled head; And the censer burning swung Where, before the altar, hung The crimson banner, that with prayer Had been consecrated there. And the nuns' sweet hymn was heard the while, Sung low in the dint, mysterious aisle, "Take thy banner! ...
— The Colored Regulars in the United States Army • T. G. Steward
... farm-house, which must have been built on the site of a part of the Priory,—the cells, dormitories, refectory, and other portions pertaining to the monks' daily life, I suppose, and built, no doubt, with the sacred stones. I should imagine it would be a haunted house, swarming with cowled spectres. We wished to see the interior of the church, and procured a guide from this farm-house,—the sexton, probably,—a gray-haired, ruddy, cheery, and intelligent man, of familiar though respectful address. The entrance of the church was ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the dark prairies shifted like a scene, and in their stead he saw, in a cold gray twilight, a high doorway built of a cold gray stone, rough-hewed and heavy. Through its arch passed then a file of gray-cowled monks, their faces concealed. Each carried a torch, whose flickering, wavering light cast weird cowled figures on the gray stone, and in their midst was borne a bier, covered with white. And as the deep bell boomed on through all the vision, like a subtle thrilling presence, Bennington ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... faces entirely covered excepting two small holes for the eyes to peep through, came to me and without speaking, made signs for me to follow them. I did so without resistance, and soon found myself in an under-ground story of the infernal building. "There is your cell," said the cowled inquisitors, "look all around, see every thing, but speak not; no not for your life. The softest whisper will immediately reach the ears of the Mother Abbess, and then you are loaded with heavy chains ...
— Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal • Sarah J Richardson
... country; a fourth, that he could not fight, his sword having been broken off at the hilt; the prior of the Augustinians said, that he could give answer any moment from the Papal Decrees, and if he was not able to do it, then he would stand there like any other "cowled pate;" and the rest in ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... something like a huge caterpillar beginning to change into a chrysalis; a grub mummy dressed out in old Catanian silk, and so enveloped in cobwebs, that you could with difficulty make out the central nucleus of shrivelled humanity. "Questo," said our cowled conductor, "e il Barone Avellina, morto di cholera, anno aetatis fifty-six; he loved our order! here is another equally good-looking personage," said he, exposing a corrugated face and dark hair, frightfully at variance with a blue silk handkerchief, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... nervousness, of an indefinable apprehension, and ere he had come to the end of the bare corridor, the poet, deserting the man, had posted halberdiers outside the door which the priest had unlocked and had set a guard over that which they were approaching. His guide became a cowled familiar of the Holy Office, and beyond the second door in an apartment black-draped and sepulchral and lighted by ghostly candles, inquisitors awaited him who, sweetly solicitous for his spiritual well-being, would watch men crush his limbs in iron boots, suspend him by his thumbs from ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... they had gained the summit, and found themselves in the heart of a huge desolation, hedged in by a chaos of peaks and pinnacles, the snows unbroken by twig or bush, untracked by living sign. Here and there the dark face of some white-cowled rock or cliff scowled at them, and although they were drenched with sweat and parched from thirst, nowhere was there the faintest tinkle of running water, while the dry powder under foot scratched their throats like iron filings when they turned ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... said the Blind Boy, "My mother, 'Dame Venus' they do call; Cowled in this hood she sent me begging For whate'er ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare
... limbs—crafty, slippery, lustful-looking devils, drawn always in outline as though possessed of a dim, infernal luminosity. Horrid fellows are they, one and all; horrid fellows and horrific scenes. In another spirit that Good-Conscience "to whom Mr. Honest had spoken in his lifetime," a cowled, grey, awful figure, one hand pointing to the heavenly shore, realises, I will not say all, but some at least of the strange impressiveness of Bunyan's words. It is no easy nor pleasant thing to speak in one's lifetime with Good-Conscience; he is ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... return together was not fitting; so Telimena stole to the right towards the garden, and Thaddeus ran to the left, to the highway. On this detour both were somewhat disturbed: it seemed to Telimena that once from behind a bush shone the thin, cowled face of Robak; Thaddeus saw distinctly that once or twice a long white phantom made its appearance on his left; what it was he knew not, but he had a suspicion that it was the Count in his ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... might save me being taken or called by him. I hastened so to do. Even as we were assembling or beginning to practice, keeping two or three light medicine balls going between each pair, our host entered—that iron man, that mount of brawn. In his cowled dressing-gown he looked more like some great monk or fighting abbot of the medieval years than a trainer. He walked to the center, hung up his cowl and revealed himself lithe and lion-like and costumed like ourselves. ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... said a coachman from a nearby hackstand, approaching the group. "I'll give it a coating of linseed oil, then varnish it and make me a cowled waterproof." ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... trolley cars curving right up to the walls; the electric lights strung in globular festoons along the ancient ceilings of the porticoes; the roofs of the new, shiny modern bungalows dotting the gentle slopes below—could forget even that the brown-cowled, rope-girthed father who served as guide spoke with a strong German accent; could almost forgive the impious driver of the rig that brought one here for referring to this place as the Mish. But be sure there would be one thing to bring you hurtling back again to earth, no ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... digging at the fortifications,—women carrying huge stones,—men more willing to shout for them than to do their own share,—Capuchin friars digging with the best,—finally, the wild dance of men, women, cowled and bearded monks, all together, brandishing their spades and shovels in cadence to the military band. With this came to me the mild smile and doubtful shake of the head of the good Admiral Baudin, and his prophetic remark,—"I have ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... cathedral of Notre Dame is unequalled in all the world. The grim towers rise boldly without ornament or decoration of any kind, and are cowled by a peculiarly strange roofing. The triple porch is denuded of its decorative statues, and there is a rank Renaissance excrescence in the rear which is unseemly, but for all that, as a mediaeval religious monument of rank, it appeals to all quite as forcibly as the brilliantly florid ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... John came to the Fair. All scarlet were his hose and jerkin, and scarlet was his cowled cap, with a scarlet feather stuck in the side of it. Over his shoulders was slung a stout bow of yew, and across his back hung a quiver of good round arrows. Many turned to look after such a stout, tall fellow, for his shoulders were broader by a palm's-breadth than any ...
— The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood • Howard Pyle
... cloister of some ancient monk, who, no doubt, led a jolly enough life of it there, or, if not there, in the refectory outside, in the days when the Acordada was a pleasant place of residence for himself and his cowled companions. For his monastery, as "Bolton Abbey in the olden time," saw many a scene of good cheer, its ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid
... day for the friars of the Servi, who were rivals of the Frari both in learning and splendor, and the entire Servite Brotherhood, black-robed and white-cowled, was just coming in sight over the little marble bridge, preceded by youthful choristers, chanting as they came and bearing with them that famous banner which had been sent them as a gift from their oldest chapter of San Annunziata in Florence, and which was the early ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... Saint Francis of Cheylas, bearing on high a silvered crucifix that flashed and scintillated in the sunlight. His cowl was thrown back, revealing his pale, ascetic countenance and shaven head. Behind him came a coffin covered by a black pall, and borne on the shoulders of six black-robed, black cowled monks, and behind these again walked, two by two, some fourteen cowled brothers of the order of Saint Francis, their heads bowed, their arms folded, and their hands tucked ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... midst of all this, and at every corner, what heaps of beautiful flowers!" said Mildred. "It is curious, too," she added, "to see, moving through this Cheapside throng, the mendicant friar, cowled and sandaled, with his wallet, or double sack that hangs across his shoulder before and behind, actually then and there ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... Asclepius (but never knew thus tormented—as with his father's arrows!) and again the Maid of the Wheel, Fortune as I suppose: but with us the wheel is not so manifestly bitter. Then also the wounded hero, cowled and corded, ragged exceedingly, the like of whom we have not, unless it be some stripling loved by an immortal and wounded to death by grudging Fate, as Atys or Adonis. And if, indeed, this were one of them, the image-maker did surely err in making him of so ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... of 4th September a whale-boat manned by natives dragged us down the green lane of the anchorage and round the spouting promontory. On the shore level it was a hot, breathless, and yet crystal morning; but high overhead the hills of Atuona were all cowled in cloud, and the ocean-river of the trades streamed without pause. As we crawled from under the immediate shelter of the land, we reached at last the limit of their influence. The wind fell upon our sails in puffs, which strengthened ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... or haply a series of them: the cowled hypocrite suggesting crime to those whose answer is all innocence; his schemes of ambition, or avarice, or lust, slowly elaborated by the fiend-like purposes to which he puts his ill-used knowledge of the human heart; his sacrilegious violation of the holy grievings made by mistaken ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... shoulder and his attention was arrested by a strange thing. The eastward stage, the one on Shooter's Hill, appeared to lift; a flash changing to a tall grey shape, a cowled figure of smoke and dust, jerked into the air. For a moment this cowled figure stood motionless, dropping huge masses of metal from its shoulders, and then it began to uncoil a dense head of smoke. The people had blown it up, aeroplane and all! As suddenly ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... saw in the Restoration a hope that the good old times would come back,—that the crucifix would again be an emblem of temporal power, mightier than the sword,—that the cowled monk would become the counsellor of kings, and once more take his share in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... night came to him with dewy fragrance. There was a grateful seclusion about the place. He blessed the happy accident, which gave him such a lodging, and fell asleep that night thinking of the nuns, who once had slept in the same quiet cells; but neither wimpled nun nor cowled monk appeared to him in his dreams; not even the face of Mary Ashburton; nor did he hear ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... Prosper rode in. It was cold and dark, and smelt of death and candle-fumes. The pilasters of the nave were already swathed in black velvet; in the choir were great lights set on the floor, in the midst of them a bier. A priest was at a little altar by the bier's head, other cowled figures crouched about it. There was a low murmur of praying, even, whining, and mechanical. On the bier Prosper saw the comely Abbot Richard Dieudonne, in cope and mitre, holding in his hand the staff of his high office. This pastor of the Church ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... item in this curious medley revives moving associations in a mind nourished on the Radcliffe school. When Cherubina visits a shop she buys a diamond cross, which at once turns our thoughts to The Sicilian Romance. In Westminster Abbey she is disappointed to find "no cowled monks with scapulars"—a phrase which flashes across our memory the sinister figure of Schedoni in The Italian. At the masquerade she plans to wear a Tuscan dress from The Mysteries of Udolpho, and, when ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... receiving guidance now from some solitary fur-capped courier du bois clad in skins and hoofed with snow-shoes, now from some peaceful Indian, now from the cowled brothers of, some forest monastery which gave them a night's shelter also. Portions of the journey they made upon sledges driven by poor habitans dwelling in the far-apart villages or solitary farmhouses. At other times they profited by boats and canoes, propelled ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... The immediate result in the sixteenth century was an abrupt secession of the learned, not merely from monasticism, but also from the true spirit of Christianity. The minds of the Italians assimilated paganism. In their hatred of mediaeval ignorance, in their loathing of cowled and cloistered fools, they flew to an extreme, and affected the manner of an irrevocable past. This extravagance led of necessity to a reaction—in the North, of Puritanism; in the South, to what has been termed the Counter-Reformation ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... Mushrooms, Pinks, Gilliflowers and many milions Of other plants, more rare, more strange then these; As very fishes living in the seas; And also Rams, Calves, Horses, Hares and Hogs, Wolves, Urchins, Lions, Elephants and Dogs; Yea, Men and Maids, and which I most admire, The Mitred Bishop, and the cowled Fryer. Of which examples but a few years since, Were shewn the Norway ...
— The Complete Angler 1653 • Isaak Walton
... invention—of barbarian invention—is to read it. Read it as you would any other book; think of it as you would any other; get the bandage of reverence from your eyes; drive from your heart the phantom of fear; push from the throne of you brain the cowled form of superstition—then read the holy bible, and you will be amazed that you ever, for one moment, supposed a being of infinite wisdom, goodness and purity, to be the author of such ignorance ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... the crouching form of the priest and into the dark chasm beyond Dorothy for the first time began to appreciate the character of her cowled rescuer. Panting and terrified, she looked into his hideously exultant face as he rose and peered over the ledge after the luckless pursuer. It was not the face of a holy man of God, but that of a creature who could laugh in the taking of a ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... king spake to a serving-man who stood before the board, and said: "Go thou, and ask yon cowled man who he is, whence he cometh, and of ...
— The Story Of Frithiof The Bold - 1875 • Anonymous
... the door with a leap, his fist driving at the cowled head of one of the figures—a solid shape that staggered backward from his blow. But the others were on him, dropping down before his rush, gripping his legs and ankles. He went down, fighting. And then something struck his face—something that ...
— The World Beyond • Raymond King Cummings
... or from the tops of such tall buildings as the beautiful Palliser Hotel, the high and austere dividing line of the Rockies can be seen across the rolling country. Snow-cowled, and almost impalpable above the ground mist, the great range of mountains looks like the curtain wall ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... crews. But at the same time the fact that at a crisis, when every moment gained was priceless, the Turks had lost the fair wind, convinced the allies that Heaven was aiding them, and gave them confidence in the promises of their chaplains, grey-cowled Franciscans and black-robed Dominicans, who were telling them that the prayers of Christendom would assure them a victory. Their young chief, Don Juan, left the "Reale" and embarked in a swift brigantine, in which he rowed along the forming line of the fleet. Clad in ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale |
