"Nunnery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... campaign of the "Wild West" had been contemplated, but the project was abandoned and winter quarters decided on. In the quaint little village of Benfield was an ancient nunnery and a castle, with good stables. Here Will left the company in charge of his partner, Mr. Nate Salisbury, and, accompanied by the Indians for whose welfare he was responsible, set sail for ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... the daughter of Nikolai Stahov of the higher nobility married to a vagrant, a nobody, without her parents' sanction! And you imagine I shall let the matter rest, that I shall not make a complaint, that I will allow you—that you—that——To the nunnery with you, and he shall go to prison, to hard labour! Anna Vassilyevna, inform her at once that you ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... sheets of water. In Cumberland there are several waterfalls, namely, Scale Force and Sour Milk Force, near Buttermere; Barrow Cascade and Lowdore Cascade, near Keswick; Airey Force, Gowbarrow Park; and Nunnery Cascade, Croglin. The highest mountains in the same county are,—Scaw Fell (Eskdale), 3166 feet, highest point; Helvellyn (Keswick), 3055; and Skiddaw (Keswick), 3022. The climate of Cumberland is various; the high land cold and piercing; the lower parts mild and temperate. The ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... would not have you Mistake my love to Roderick so much, To think I meant to fall into your hands. My purpose is for the next nunnery; There I'll ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... the heir of the last of the Shoguns down to democratic Barons who prefer to be called "Mr.", I chatted with farmers' wives and daughters, I interrogated landladies and mill girls, and I paid a memorable visit to a Buddhist nunnery. I walked, talked, rode, ate and bathed with common folk and with dignitaries. I discussed the situation of Japan with the new countryman in college agricultural laboratories and classrooms, and, in a remote region, beheld what is rare nowadays, the old countryman ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... one that evening Dame Isabel lay in the pallet in my stead, and was so late up, and passed by the antechamber door with her shoes in her hands, as little Meliora the sub-damsel would have it she saw by the keyhole): and we might nearhand as well have been in nunnery for all the folks we saw that were not of the house. Verily, I grew sick irked [wearied, distressed] of the calm, that was like a dead calm at sea, when ships lie to, and can win neither forward nor backward. Ah, foolish Cicely! thou hadst better have given thanks for the last peace thou wert to ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... Clara, meaning to make the most with her of Garcia's condition, and hoping that thus he could divert her a little from Thurstane. But somehow all his messages failed; the little house which held her repelled him as if it had been a nunnery; nor could he get a word or even a note from her. The truth is that Clara, fearing lest Coronado should tell more stories about her million to Thurstane, had taken the women of the family into her confidence and easily ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... Memmingen. On the way he was taken by the plague, and with difficulty dragged himself in to Ravensburg. For three months he lay ill, and death came very close. As its unearthly glow irradiated the world around him, reversing its light and shade, the visions of the nunnery recurred. He vowed that if his life were still his to give, it should be given to God's service; and on recovering he ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... and the cats," said the Kammerjunker, "look like dried fish! Then you must also see the nunnery ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... took place, and four figures in dark coats stole down the stairs. Though the building of the College might be absolutely modern, the garden was a relic of mediaeval days. It had formerly belonged to the nunnery of St. Mary's, and had adjoined the Abbey. Parts of the crumbling old wall were still left, and a flagged path led from a sun-dial to some ruins. In the day-time it was a cheerful place, and a blaze of color. The girls had never before seen it in ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... mention of "children strangely decked and apparelled to counterfeit priests, bishops, and women," that on these occasions "divine service was not only performed by boys, but by little girls," and "there is an injunction given to the Benedictine Nunnery of Godstowe in Oxfordshire, by Archbishop Peckham, in the year 1278, that on Innocents' Day the public prayers should not any more be said in the church of that monastery per parvulas, i.e. little girls" (408. ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... the business of the Church to correct the errors of Providence!); and what they sought they found at once in a certain favourite establishment of the vicar's, a Church-of-England beguinage, or quasi-Protestant nunnery, which he fostered in a neighbouring city, and went thither on all high tides to confess the young ladies, who were in all things nuns, but bound by no vows, except, of course, such as they might choose to make ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... deep, hollow cup, lined with turf as green and short as the sod of this common. The very oldest of the trees, gnarled mighty oaks, crowd about the brink of this dell. In the bottom lie the ruins of a nunnery." ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... contributed to terrify the Protestants. The fear of being sent to the galleys for life—the threat of losing the whole of one's goods and property—the alarm of seeing one's household broken up, the children seized by the priests and sent to the nearest monkery or nunnery for maintenance and education—all these considerations doubtless had their effect in increasing the ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... as of old. Of course we shall see one another as people do who live in the same world: I am not going into a nunnery. Cecil will be a great man some day, and I shall recollect with pride that for six years he loved only me. He did not mention Mr. Brotherton: I think he has heard, but if not, he will hear soon enough from other people. If we were not so awfully poor, Nell, or if poverty were ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... governor's son, Lodowick, is inexcusably vindictive, quite apart from the vile share in it which he forces upon his daughter. The nunnery crime, again, is monstrous in its gross injustice to Abigail's constancy and in its Herodian comprehensiveness. After this his other murders and intrigues seem more justified. The two friars, his servant Ithamore and the rest can well be spared by any exit; ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... be regarded as a modern foundation ranking with Downing or Selwyn by the hurried visitor who had failed to consult his guide-book and had not previous information to aid him. It was actually founded as long ago as 1497, and the buildings include the church and other parts of the Benedictine nunnery of the Virgin and ...
— Beautiful Britain—Cambridge • Gordon Home
... place to which they had been assigned by God Almighty." It was all of no use; the Prince insisted, and his wrath was dangerous. The Bismarcks gave in; they surrendered Burgstall and received in exchange Schoenhausen and Crevisse, a confiscated nunnery, on condition that as long as the ejected nuns lived the new lords should support them; for which purpose the Bismarcks had annually to supply a certain quantity of food and eighteen ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... in these days can tell us? Still less bad we two found out any such duality or discord in ourselves; for we were gentle and obedient children. The pleasures of the world did not tempt us. We did not know of their existence; and no foundlings educated in a nunnery ever grew up in a more virginal and spotless innocence—if ignorance be ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... inflicted during a combat with Mandricardo; and she had been thrown by the loss into such anguish of mind that she would have died on his sword but for the intervention of the hermit now with her, who persuaded her to devote the rest of her days to God in a nunnery. She had now come into Provence with the good man for that purpose, and to bury the corpse of her husband in the ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... serious-minded woman, with a leaning to melancholy; and this unexpected and evidently enjoyable flight—or plunge—into pure nonsense, caused him a distinct uneasiness. The girl was brightening up, even becoming merry; a state of mind that never leads to a nunnery. ...
— The Pines of Lory • John Ames Mitchell
... taken up her residence there with somewhat the feeling of a novice entering a nunnery. She was not quite sure how she and Aunt Harriet were going to get on. To her great relief, however, things turned out better than she expected. Miss Beach received her with unusual complacency, ...
— The Luckiest Girl in the School • Angela Brazil
... Coed," said I, "means the head of the wood. I suppose that in the old time the mountain looked over some extensive forest, even as the nunnery of Pengwern looked originally over an alder-swamp, for Pengwern means the head ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... honoured as founders of the Benedictine monastery at Coventry, which rose upon the ruins of an earlier house of Benedictine nuns founded by Osburg, a lady of the royal house, nearly two hundred years before. This nunnery had been destroyed in the Danish wars about the year 1016. Consequently, if any legend, or ceremony, was known or practised at Coventry in connection with some traditional patroness, the name of Godgifu was ready to hand to be identified with it. Through the monastery ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... instantly answered, creeping up and nestling against him; 'and I will not think at all that you used me harshly if you will forgive me, and not be vexed with me any more? I do wish I had been exactly as you thought I was, but I could not help it, you know. If I had only known you had been coming, what a nunnery I would have lived in to have been good ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... tassels and fringe! That is the burden of what I have to say to you this time; for indeed and indeed this is to be a fringe-and-tassel season, and you must cover yourself all over with fringe and the rest of yourself with tassels, or else "to a nunnery go." ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various
... fooling with a nunnery either here or in Spain. The Portuguese are not so bigoted as the Spaniards across the frontier, but there is not much difference, and if anyone is caught meddling with a nunnery they would tear him to pieces, especially in Oporto, where men who are even suspected of hostility ...
— With Moore At Corunna • G. A. Henty
... I am unkind, That from the nunnery Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind To war and arms ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... Bray the only house into which you have introduced disorder. At the nunnery of Sapwell, which you also contend to be under your jurisdiction, you change the prioresses and superiors again and again at your own will and caprice. Here, as well as at Bray, you depose those who are good and religious; you promote to the highest dignities the worthless and the vicious. ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... in 1077; came over with Lanfranc; also a great friend of Anselm; a skilful architect, rebuilt much of the cathedral, built the White Tower in London, St. Leonard's Tower and the nunnery at Malling, part of Dartford Church, and a tower at Rochester earlier than the present keep; substituted Benedictines for the old secular establishment of the cathedral; famous for piety and holiness, and in favour with the Conqueror and the two sons who succeeded him; died ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Rochester - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • G. H. Palmer
... satirical pieces in verse. It describes a lubber-land, or fool's paradise, where the geese fly down all roasted on the spit, bringing garlic in the bills for their dressing, and where there is a nunnery upon a river of sweet milk, and an abbey of white monks and gray, whose walls, like the hall of little King Pepin, are "of pie-crust and pastry crust," with flouren cakes for the shingles and ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... led the line turned my way inquiringly. He did not have to wait long for what was to come, nor did I. Another gate farther along in the nunnery wall opened and out came six more soldiers, bearing another of these narrow-shouldered coffins, and accompanied by a couple of nurses, an officer and an assistant surgeon. At sight of them the soldiers brought their pieces up to a salute, and held the posture rigidly until the second ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... months, they came back for his wife. Her they placed in the nunnery of the Carmelites—that prison where, but a few months before, a mob relieved the keepers of their vigils by killing all ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... splendor-loving court, where all acknowledged the sway of Clotilda. Her father lavished the whole of his affection upon his elder daughter: the latter seldom noticed her, and thought her more fit for a nunnery or for a peasant's cottage, than for the station of a princess. And so Edith grew to womanhood, unspoiled by flattery—that incense was reserved for Clotilda's shrine. Not in that crowd of selfish courtiers and of worldly ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... fathers may chance spy your parting. Refuse not you by any means, good sweetness, To go unto the Nunnery; far from hence Must we beget your love's sweet happiness. You shall not stay there long; your harder bed Shall be more soft when Nun ...
— The Merry Devil • William Shakespeare
... very well; but they failed to make allowances for the inevitable quarrel and the subsequent spectacle of the gentleman contemplating suicide and the lady looking wistfully toward a nunnery. In this case it arose, I believe, over Teddy Anstruther, who for a cousin was undeniably very attentive to Margaret; and in the natural course of events they would have made it up before the week was out had not Frederick R. Woods selected this very moment to ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... gentleman. "The good lady next door says he is studying too hard and needs young society, amusement, and exercise. I suspect she is right, and that I've been coddling the fellow as if I'd been his grandmother. Let him do what he likes, as long as he is happy. He can't get into mischief in that little nunnery over there, and Mrs. March is doing more for him than ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... sins, was houselled and anhealed, and died on Passion Tuesday, April 6th. His brain and bowels were buried at Charroux, his heart at Rouen, and his body at his father's feet, in penitence, in the nunnery of Fontevrault. Hugh was on his way to the Cathedral at Angers to take duty the next day, Palm Sunday, when Gilbert de Lacy, a clerk, rode up to him and told him of the king's death and of the funeral ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... 'Just a nunnery, then—no more nor less than that. The "Sacred Heart" at Namur, or the Sisters of Mercy here at home in Bagot Street, I believe, if ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... were churches, monasteries, and nunneries, and its chief productions crucifixes, rosaries, and saints. The most celebrated among the latter, was Saint Bridget, who received the veil from the hands of St Patrick himself. She founded a nunnery here, which was most remarkable for "the sacred fire," which the nuns who succeeded her kept burning for hundreds of years—in remembrance of her, probably. From a little story related of her, when she was a child, I should ...
— Stories and Legends of Travel and History, for Children • Grace Greenwood
... noblest pedigree, (His Sire was of Castile, his Dam from Aragon) Then, for accomplishments of chivalry, In case our Lord the King should go to war again, He learned the arts of riding, fencing, gunnery, And how to scale a fortress—or a nunnery. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... of her house there lived a maiden lady of seventy, in the most retired manner, of whom my landlady gave me this account: that she was a Roman Catholic, had been sent abroad when young, and lodg'd in a nunnery with an intent of becoming a nun; but, the country not agreeing with her, she returned to England, where, there being no nunnery, she had vow'd to lead the life of a nun, as near as might be done in those circumstances. Accordingly, she had ...
— The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... there any hope for her? Could he not take her to some nunnery midway, and let her write to her uncle to fetch ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... nuns of Almesbury. Lancelot fled to his castle in the north, where the King in vain besieged him. Meanwhile Modred had stirred up a revolt, and leaguing himself with the Saxon invaders, had usurped Arthur's throne. On his march southward to resist his nephew, Arthur halts at the nunnery of Almesbury, and in the Guinevere idyll the moving story of their last farewell is told. Then the King advanced to meet Modred. The description of that "last weird battle in the west" is given in The Passing of ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... foundation consists of a dean and twelve canons, with eighteen other inferior clergy. Since 1839 it has ranked as a cathedral, Tempio having been erected into a see united with those of Cività and Ampurias, and the bishop residing here six months of the year. There is a massive old nunnery, now, I believe, suppressed, in the centre of the place, and outside the town a reformatory for the confinement of criminals sentenced to secondary punishment, a large building with ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... of nuns admitted. An ecclesiastic of high degree made strenuous efforts to rescue three nuns who had just been admitted, but the abbess persistently refused to surrender them until her excommunication was published on the walls of the nunnery. ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... cattle, flying of birds, and swimming of fish, which were so artfully represented, as if they had been alive. She died 23rd Henry II. anno 1176, by poison (as was suspected) given her by Queen Eleanor, and was buried in the Chapter-house of the Nunnery ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 331, September 13, 1828 • Various
... thee to a nunnery: Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest; but yet I could accuse me of such things, that it were better my mother had not borne me: I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious; ...
— Hamlet • William Shakespeare
... eldest Antipholus and Dromio away from her, she entered a nunnery, and by her wise and virtuous conduct, she was at length made lady abbess of this convent, and in discharging the rites of hospitality to an unhappy stranger she had unknowingly protected ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... and Ophelia would have passed their lives in the seclusion of a nunnery, without wishing, like Isabella, for stricter bonds, or planning, like St. Theresa, the reformation of their order, simply, because any restraint would have been efficient, as far as they were concerned. Isabella, "dedicate to nothing temporal," might have found resignation through ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... of the natural human impulse against the constraint of ascetic vows; the irresistible yielding to nature and to the call of a passion interwoven with the very fibres of humanity. The sombre Boston parlor vanished, and he seemed to be in some old-world nunnery with the unknown lovers. He felt all their guilty bliss and their scalding remorse. He sighed so deeply that the soft laugh behind him seemed almost an echo. Turning quickly, he found Berenice watching him with a teasing smile on ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... might. The quarrel to her had been as the disruption of the heavens. She had declared to herself that she would bear it; but the misfortune to be borne was a broken world falling about her own ears. She had thought of a nunnery, of Ophelia among the water-lilies, and of an early death-bed. Then she had pictured to herself the somewhat ascetic and very laborious life of an old maiden lady whose only recreation fifty years hence should consist in looking at the portrait of him who had once been her lover. And now ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... am unkind,— That from the nunnery Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind To war and arms ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various
... which was painted the ancient Dance of Death with which his own after-creations were so often to be confused, Holbein must many a time have studied the famous old copy. For though the Dominican painting was then nearly a century old, it was a copy of a still older original in the Klein-Basel nunnery of Klingenthal, a community ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... you still here, for I will forth on my journey, and no man nor child shall go with me. So it was no boot to strive, but he departed and rode westerly and sought seven or eight days, and at the last he came to a nunnery. And then was Queen Guinevere ware of Sir Lancelot as he walked in the cloister. And when she saw him there she swooned thrice, that all the ladies and gentlewomen had work enough to hold the Queen up. So when she might speak she called the ladies and gentlewomen ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... Scottish Government. Priors Akefield and Drax are historical, and as the latter really did commission a body of moss- troopers to divert an instalment of King James's ransom into his own private coffers, I do not think I can have done him much injustice. As the nunnery of St. Abbs has gone bodily into the sea, I have been the less constrained by the inconvenient action of fact upon fiction. And for the Hospital of St. Katharine's-by-the-Tower, its history is to be found in ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Venetian Archipelago are about fifty in number, of various size and extremely picturesque. They were each of them the seat of a monastery or nunnery, till Napoleon came, who overthrew these saintly receptacles, converting them into forts, mills, public gardens, &c. In short, these islands are among the most beautiful contingents of this magic scene. Each has its graceful campanile, and its various structures ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... Its ruins are situated on a high rocky point; and, doubtless, many a vow was made to the shrine by the distressed mariners, who drove towards the iron-bound coast of Northumberland in stormy weather. It was anciently a nunnery; for Virca, abbess of Tynemouth, presented St. Cuthbert (yet alive) with a rare winding- sheet, in emulation of a holy lady called Tuda, who had sent him a coffin: but, as in the case of Whitby, and of Holy Island, the introduction of nuns at Tynemouth, in the reign of Henry VIII, is an anachronism. ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... odds. Of course, if they are favourably made and are not tied by kinship duties, they may run away from the industrial battlefield. In which event the safest thing the man can do is to join the army; and for the woman, possibly, to become a Red Cross nurse or go into a nunnery. In either case they must forego home and children and all that makes life worth living and old ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... role of association of ideas in the same matter. One Sunday night I left Noumea in the carriage of Dr. F...... who was going to visit a nunnery five leagues from there. At the moment of our arrival the doctor asked what time it was. 'Half-past two,' I said, looking at my watch. As we stopped in the convent court in front of the chapel I heard the lusty conclusion of a psalm. 'They ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... stood, like its modern successor, and seemed the queen of the valley, although, on the opposite side of the river, the strong walls of Elcho appeared to dispute the pre-eminence. Elcho, however, was in that age a peaceful nunnery, and the walls with which it was surrounded were the barriers of secluded vestals, not the bulwarks of ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... she cried with ringing scorn. "If that is a man's devotion, I will end my days in a nunnery. I will have none of it, I tell you. Choose, my fine lover choose between ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... against London Wall, a little to the eastward of Cripplegate, where anciently stood a nunnery, and afterwards a hospital founded for a hundred blind men, anno 1320, by W. Elsing, mercer, and called Elsing's Spittal: he afterwards founded here a priory for canons regular, which being surrendered to King Henry VIII. anno 1530, it was purchased ...
— London in 1731 • Don Manoel Gonzales
... to be Shut up like in a nunnery; Awm fond o' life, an love a spree, As weel as onny other." "Tha cannot goa," sed Jim, "that's flat." "But goa aw shall, awl tell thee that! What wod ta have a woman at? Shame on ...
— Yorkshire Lyrics • John Hartley
... dear Papa, We one and all seem quite to be upset, 'Tis hotter than last summer was by far, At least so everybody says, but yet Much hotter than last June it could not be, And that's what I think, what do you think, pet? To sit indoors 'tis like a nunnery, With nought to do but tamely sit and knit, In fact I never liked such quietness ...
— The Minstrel - A Collection of Poems • Lennox Amott
... wife, he was quartered in Ireland, at Clonmel, where was a nunnery, in which, as pensioner, resided Miss O'Neill, or as she was called in the country, Peg O'Neill—the heiress of ...
— J.S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 5 • J.S. Le Fanu
... if he who had delivered her would take her in marriage, she would be his. If not, she would go into a nunnery, and he could marry no other as long as she lived, for he was wedded to her with the service of the dead, ...
— The Pink Fairy Book • Various
... this. Persuade thy beauteous child To leave the nunnery and return to court, And I protest from henceforth to forswear All such conceits of lust ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... dear. A woman cannot be at the same time the wife of a man and the spouse of Christ. That would be bigamy; she must choose between a husband and a nunnery. For the sake of future advantage you have stripped your soul of all the love, all the devotion, which God commands that you should have for me, you have cherished ...
— A Second Home • Honore de Balzac
... sketches so daintily might have been seen any day ambling through Bishopsgate from her country nunnery, on her way to shrine or altar, or on a visit to some noble patroness to whom she is akin. "By St. Eloy!" she cries to her mule, "if thou stumble again I will chide thee!" and she says it in the French of Stratford at Bow. Her wimple is trimly plaited, and ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... of the villains; and he was told that Monsieur Cournal had engaged them. To the question what was to be done with Madame Cournal, another answered that she was to be waylaid as she was coming from the Intendance, kidnapped, and hurried to a nunnery to be imprisoned ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... is really a worthy vocation for me to go to Quedlinberg and become the shepherdess of that fearful flock of old maids who took refuge in a nunnery because no man desired them? No, your majesty, do not send me to Quedlinberg; it is not my calling to build up the worthy nuns into saints of the Most High. I am too unsanctifled myself to be an example to them, ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... said Lancelot, "I go upon my quest." So mounted he and rode alone Eight days into the West. And to a nunnery came at last Hard by a forest ride, And walking in the cloister-shades Was by the Queen espied. And, when she saw him, swooned she thrice And said, when speak she might, "Ye marvel why I make this fare? 'Tis truly for the sight Of yonder knight that standeth there, And so must ...
— A Legend of Old Persia and Other Poems • A. B. S. Tennyson
... getting out, pray," returned Diana. "We shall never get out except by marrying, or really going into a nunnery." ...
— A Forgotten Hero - Not for Him • Emily Sarah Holt
... thus been reared in a manner as near to that of the nunnery as tribal conditions would permit, it was with a great and maidenly anxiety that she peeped out at the man who had surely come for her, at the husband who was to teach her all that was yet unlearned of life, at the masterful being whose word was to be her law, and who ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... also the walls of the bishop's residence here, with the bells of St. Brendan; they told me this was the saint who discovered the happy land flowing with milk and honey, the key to which lies hidden in Cuneen Miaul's tomb and the ruins of an extensive abbey, a monastery and a nunnery ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... nunneries and monkeries, whilst I may fairly admit some good to be found in both. My real protest is for liberty both to mind and body, and against coercion of any kind, material or spiritual. Given perfect freedom, I would not meddle with any one's honest convictions: "to a nunnery go" if thou wilt; only let the resolve be revocable, not a doom ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... simplicity of maidenhood itself. And from both he extracts the same pathetic little moral: both are lovely and both must die. And so, between his virgins that are for love indeed and those that sit silent and delicious in the 'flowery nunnery,' the old singer finds life so good a thing that he dreads to lose it, and not all his piety can remove the passionate regret with which he sees things hastening ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... hands of a relative—and the grave of the victim is not far from Richard's own monument. We saw in St. Edmund's Chapel the fourteenth-century brass which marks the last resting-place of the Duke's widow, Eleanor de Bohun, who retired to a nunnery after her husband's tragic fate. We have looked at the tombs of Edward III. and of Richard II. from the ambulatory side; both are of English workmanship. That of the elder monarch is finer and more elaborate than the other, which ...
— Westminster Abbey • Mrs. A. Murray Smith
... the tendency may not be accentuated. Other parents, observing their daughter's inclination to be frivolous, or seeing the instinct of sex begin to manifest itself in her interest in young men, send her away to a girl's school—a sort of intellectual nunnery. ...
— Principles of Teaching • Adam S. Bennion
... of the household and the newly-arrived family of grandchildren. She was one of those calm, quiet, big-souled women who in the early centuries would have been a saint, and in mediaeval times the abbess of a nunnery, but happening to be born in the nineteenth century, her mental outlook had a modern bias, and both her philanthropy and her religious instincts had developed along the latest lines of thought. She had schemes of her own for work in the world, but ...
— The Princess of the School • Angela Brazil
... sure. We have never liked one another. But I have something on my conscience, and I may not have another opportunity of speaking to you. I don't suppose you have heard that very shortly I intend to enter a nunnery at Roehampton." ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... "We visited a nunnery of the order of St. Dominic. In the chapel was a fine statue of the Virgin Mary, with four wax candles burning before her. Peeping through the bars, we perceived several fine young women at prayers. A middle-aged woman opened the door halfway, but would by no means suffer us to enter ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... great fire. To northward, in a contrast that leaps ages, rise the huge walls of the Tor de' Conti, greatest of mediaeval fortresses built within the city, the stronghold of a dim, great house, long passed away, kinsmen of Innocent the Third. What is left of it helps to enclose a peaceful nunnery. ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... futuro, being confirmed by oath, she can force upon him, and which will invalidate his proposed marriage with the duchess. Having established her right, she takes the only step that can with certainty free both herself and Bertoldo from the bond they had created, by retiring into a nunnery. ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... subtlety; that's their casuistry; which arguments you may imagine to refer, as your fancy pleases, to the village curate, or the tonsured priest of the monastery over the hill. For the tonsured priest, and the monastery, and the nunnery, and the mass, and the Virgin Mary, have grown to be a very great power indeed in English lanes. Between the Roman missal and the chapel hymn-book, the country curate with his good old-fashioned litany is ground very small indeed, and grows less and less between ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... significance to these promises which the meanest English peasant could understand. Edith, or Matilda, was the daughter of King Malcolm of Scotland and of Margaret, the sister of Eadgar AEtheling. She had been brought up in the nunnery of Romsey where her aunt Christina was a nun; and the veil which she had taken there formed an obstacle to her union with the King, which was only removed by the wisdom of Anselm. While Flambard, the embodiment ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... a Scots church of the same material, several dissenting places of worship, and a magnificent cathedral, almost equal in size to that at Montreal, for Roman Catholics, with a smaller church attached, a seminary for educating the priests, a nunnery, and an Hotel Dieu, conducted by Sisters of Charity; also an immense building for a public hospital, extensive barracks for troops, and several private houses of ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... ring the lady-bells Of the nunnery by the Fosse:— Say the hinds their silver music swells 'Like the blessed angels' syllables, At His birth who ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... their Parents, their Husbands, and their Lovers, I let them in all at once, desiring them to divert themselves together as well as they could. Upon their emerging again into Day-light, you would have fancied my Cave to have been a Nunnery, and that you had seen a solemn Procession of Religious marching out, one behind another, in the most profound Silence and the most exemplary Decency. As I was very much delighted with so edifying a Sight, there came towards me a great Company of Males and Females ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... altar was raised on the spot where shone the bright image of the Peruvian deity, and the cloisters of the Indian temple were trodden by the friars of St. Dominic.6 To make the metamorphosis more complete, the House of the Virgins of the Sun was replaced by a Roman Catholic nunnery.7 Christian churches and monasteries gradually supplanted the ancient edifices, and such of the latter as were suffered to remain, despoiled of their heathen insignia, were placed under the ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... a proper nunnery under the control of the superior of the monks, who delegated elderly men to care for its discipline. With the exception of regulations concerning dress, both monks and nuns observed the same rule which S. Pachomius wrote for them[3]. ...
— Early Double Monasteries - A Paper read before the Heretics' Society on December 6th, 1914 • Constance Stoney
... if I don't think it's a nunnery," he said. By and by he let his gaze wander back to the town, in which he detected an appearance of liveliness and bustle not usual in New England villages, large or small. The main street was dotted with ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... strongly. Marcella cared nothing for men's admiration, and yet, instead of retiring to one of those nunneries which are founded for her kind, she chose to rove the mountains, causing despair to all the shepherds. Zuleika, with her peculiar temperament, would have gone mad in a nunnery. "But," you may argue, "ought not she to have taken the veil, even at the cost of her reason, rather than cause so much despair in the world? If Marcella was a basilisk, as you seem to think, how about Miss Dobson?" Ah, but Marcella knew quite well, boasted ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... was he called by name. A wife he had; of noble kin she came: The rector of the town her father was. With her he gave full many a pan of brass, That Simkin with his blood should thus ally. She had been brought up in a nunnery; For Simkin ne'er would take a wife, he said, Unless she were well tutored and a maid, To carry on his line of yeomanry: And she was proud and pert as is a pie. It was a pleasant thing to see these two: On holidays before ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... and began the improvement of a tract of land immediately above the city. They erected a house and chapel; they planted the front of their land with the myrtle wax shrub. Soon after, the foundation was laid for a large nunnery, into which the ladies removed in 1730, and occupied it until 1824. On every side the work of improvement proceeded gradually, but effectually. Among other expedients to hasten the progress of population, ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... the nunnery gate, As the darkness fell over the village, Would a swart savage crouch and await, With the patience of devilish hate, A chance to kill women, ...
— Fleurs de lys and other poems • Arthur Weir
... heard, that he was not sorry at having an opportunity of being alone, to reflect on all had passed; but the deeper he entered into thought, the more strange it still seemed to him; till happening accidentally to fall into some discourse with a gentleman in the village, he was told by him, that the nunnery they were in sight of, was called, Le Convent de Riche Dames; that none but women of condition entered themselves into it, and that they enjoyed liberties little different from those that live in the world:—'It is true,' said this person, 'the gay manner ...
— Life's Progress Through The Passions - Or, The Adventures of Natura • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... there was a halt at Corbeil, where was the nunnery of Alice Bourke, of whom her brother and sister-in-law were to take leave. They, with the children, were set down there, while Arthur went on with the carriage and servants to the ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and then I loathe myself in dust and ashes. Oh! let me go somewhere, where I may be at peace—anywhere in the world where I shall be in nobody's way. Ask father to send me back to school—I am young enough, and shall be years yet; or I should like to go into a nunnery, that must be such a peaceful place. No stormy passions—no ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... of the river, opposite to the hotels, is a very beautiful island with a nunnery upon it. This island is called Nonnenwerth. Now, in regard to all these castles and churches, and other sacred edifices on the Rhine, there is almost always some old legend or romantic tale, which ...
— Rollo on the Rhine • Jacob Abbott
... a heart over-flowing with love and delight, was among the first to enter. He enquired of every one he met of the fate of Isabelle; but all turned from him with disgust. At length he found her out, but what was his grief and surprise—in a nunnery! Firm to the troth she had so solemnly plighted, she had rejected the proposition of her mercenary parent; and, having no idea but that her lover had shared the fate of all Christian captives, she had shut herself up from the world, and vowed to live the life ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... their old cellars! It's such fun drinking it out of great silver vessels as old as Methuselah. 'There's much treasure in the house of the righteous,' as David says; and any one who has ever sacked a nunnery ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... town, but decayed: some monasteries in it, but none good nor rich. There was in a nunnery, when I was there, a daughter of Secretary Windebank. There is English provisions, and of all sorts, cheap and good. We hired a boat to carry us up to Orleans, and we were towed up all the river ...
— Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe • Lady Fanshawe
... true—Constance will wear her ermined robes of state—but where is the cheerful residence of elegant sufficiency, in which I was to sing to my De Vallance? Eustace only speaks of his own adventures. Oh, this merchant's daughter of St. Helier; I wish she had been locked up in a nunnery. Doubtless, she is young and beautiful; but prosperity is a becoming ornament. I will take courage, and ask ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... being "the fortress of the hill," and was its other Cymric appellation Agnedh, connected with its ever having been given as a marriage-portion (Agwedh)? Or did its old name of Maiden Castle, or Castrum Puellarum, not rather originate in its olden use as a female prison, or as a school, or a nunnery? ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... some few days after these events that the presence of Lady Agnes de Clarenham was requested in the parlour of her nunnery, which was some miles distant from Bordeaux, by a person who, as the porteress informed her, was the bearer of a message from the Princess of Wales. She descended accordingly, but her surprise was great on beholding, instead of one of the female ...
— The Lances of Lynwood • Charlotte M. Yonge
... qualification. So he concluded his essay in the pooh-pooh tone of voice. He first gives a sketch of abnormalities in mortal experience, as in the case of mental epidemics, of witchcraft, of the so-called prophets in the Cevennes, of the Jansenist marvels. He mentions a nunnery where, 'in the sixteenth century,' there occurred, among other phenomena, movements of inanimate objects, pottery specially distinguishing itself, as in the famous 'Stockwell mystery'. Unluckily he supplies no references for these adventures.' {57} The Revue, being written for men and women ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... Fu-jen, the third daughter of Hsi Wang Mu, had entered a nunnery on Nan-min Shan, to the north of Lo-fou Shan, where her mother's palace was situated. She mounted a dragon to visit her mother, and all along the course left a streak of light in her wake. One day the Emperor Yao, from the top of Ch'ing-yuen ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner |
