Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 16, 2025
The vows of recluses were held very sacred; and the opinions of the Boni-Homines on the monastic question were little in advance of those of the Church of Rome. Had Sir Richard been a peer, he would have said "our hands." This style, now exclusively royal, was in 1372 employed by all the nobles. This adjective also was peculiar to the peerage and the Royal Family.
Of course there were varieties of local characters without his limitations; venerable merchants retired from the East India trade; elderly gentlewomen, with family jewels and personal peculiarities; one or two scholarly recluses in by-gone cut of coat, haunting the Athenaeum reading-room; ex-sea captains, with rings on their fingers, like Simon Danz's visitors in Longfellow's poem men who had played busy parts in the bustling world, and had drifted back to Old Strawberry Bank in the tranquil sunset of their careers.
A century ago, I reflected, and this was a monastery; little then thought the pious, penitent recluses that their cells would now re-echo only to the sounds of blasphemy and licentious song, instead of holy hymn and lamentation from woman's lips; that it would become a dwelling for the wicked of every class- -the most part destined to perpetual labour or to the gallows.
The recluses of our monasteries, like the Roman Catholic monks, passed their time in translating, copying, and even producing original compositions upon such subjects, and that, remember, during the Tarter period!... In this connection, I am reminded of a poem compiled in a convent a translation from the Greek, of course called, 'The Travels of the Mother of God among the Damned, with fitting illustrations and a boldness of conception inferior nowise to that of Dante.
You understand, for a very long time ... I have not known woman intimately ... A repulsive, unbridled beast awoke within me ... and ... But, Lord, is my fault so great, then? Holy people, anchorites, recluses, ascetics, stylites, hermits in deserts, are no match for me in fortitude of spirit yet even they fell in the struggle with the temptation of the diabolical flesh.
The reaction in lyric form showed itself in the decay of sonnet, pastoral and madrigal, in the neglect of blank verse, in the development of the couplet. Milton, in such matters as these, was a solitary survival of the Elizabethans. Metrical experimentation almost ceased, except in the hands of ingenious recluses like George Herbert.
At the same instant the bell struck again; and the funeral hymn was recommenced by the junior recluses. Sister Alba now approached Flora and the countess, and said in a low whisper, "The vengeance of the conventual discipline is terrible on those who sin! That miserable girl completed her novitiate five months ago; and the night before she was to take the veil she escaped.
"Our age is not an age of martyrdom, nor an age of hermits, nor a monastic age. Although it has its martyrs, its recluses, and its monastic communities, these are not, and are not likely to be, its prevailing types of Christian perfection.
This ecclesiastic was a holy man, of fine carriage, well proportioned, with beautiful black eyes and a head like Tiberius. He was wearied with fasting, pale and worn, and continually battling with temptation, like all recluses. The old nobleman still hoped perhaps to be able to kill a monk before finishing his first lease of life.
Conformably with the above apologue, a king had a business of importance in hand. He said: "If this affair prosper to my wish I will distribute among the recluses a certain sum in dirams."
Word Of The Day
Others Looking