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Hermit   /hˈərmət/   Listen
Hermit

noun
1.
One retired from society for religious reasons.  Synonym: anchorite.
2.
One who lives in solitude.  Synonyms: recluse, solitary, solitudinarian, troglodyte.



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"Hermit" Quotes from Famous Books



... his studious cloister's pale, are thus more akin to the modern scientific thinker than he commonly realises—perhaps because he is still, for the most part, of the solitary individualism of the hermit of the Thebaid, of Diogenes in his tub. Assuredly, they are less removed in essential psychology than their derived fraternities, their [Page: 85] respective novices and scholars, have often thought. It is thus no mere ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes

... a house not far from the Burdock station. An old woman did the cooking for him and went home at night. For the rest he dwelt almost like a hermit, and so far as any one knew he had not a relative in the world. But the report had gone out as it always does in such cases, that he was very rich, and now his desire to see a lawyer and make a will convinced Roy that for once ...
— Two Boys and a Fortune • Matthew White, Jr.

... hermit? I am surrounded with friends! Ned Carter comes and smokes with me until my room is one impervious fog, all the while protesting undying friendship, and asking me to write love verses for him. Tom Randolph is a faithful friend and companion. Stay, look at that ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous

... we passed through at noon with a stray penny—my last coin. I saw ripe bilberries gleaming here and there, like jet beads in the heath: I gathered a handful and ate them with the bread. My hunger, sharp before, was, if not satisfied, appeased by this hermit's meal. I said my evening prayers at its conclusion, ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte

... idea there was such a wilderness in this part of the country," remarked Ned, as they walked along, looking in vain for something to shoot at. "I wonder if we'll come across a lonely cabin, where a hermit or ...
— Frank Roscoe's Secret • Allen Chapman

... throat, accompanied by a pricking heat in the eye balls. I hastily join conversation with the child, and inwardly felicitate myself that the gardener is opportunely gone for the key of the house. But the child is a sort of homily to me. He is perfectly quiet and resigned, an unconscious hermit. I ask him jocularly if he gets as much abused as I used to do for running down the bank; but the child's perfect seriousness of answer staggers me—"O no, grandpapa doesn't allow it—why should he?" I feel caught: I stand abashed at the reproof; I must not expose ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... those who are described by the epithets rough and uneducated. The rough and uneducated are the chosen vessels into which God pours the elixirs at which we marvel. From among the rough and uneducated, prophets arise—an Apostle Peter, or St. Peter the Hermit. Wherever mental power is imprisoned, and remains intact and entire for want of an outlet in conversation, in politics, in literature, in the imaginings of the scholar, in the efforts of the statesman, in the conceptions of the inventor, ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac

... first day, with a late start. It was not bad, but the next day we determined to do better. At five o'clock we were up, and at five-thirty tents were down and breakfast under way. We had had a visitor the night before—that curious anomaly, a young hermit. He had been a very well-known pugilist in the light-weight class and, his health failing, he had sought the wilderness. There he had lived for ...
— Tenting To-night - A Chronicle of Sport and Adventure in Glacier Park and the - Cascade Mountains • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... remained with his old friend, who was glad to learn from him many things which could never have reached his ears from any other source. He lived as a hermit and a recluse inside his little cell, which was lost in the vast dimensions of the Mosque of el-Azhar. As he was lost to the world, so was he surrounded by things of ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer

... prancing horses, and attended by an array of servants. A monastic life, or the life of an anchorite, was held by the Egyptians in scorn; and indeed the state of mind which produces the monk and the hermit was almost entirely unknown to the nation in dynastic times. It was only in the Ptolemaic and Roman periods that asceticism came to be practised; and some have thought that its introduction into Egypt is to be attributed to the preaching of the Hindoo ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall

... anything mad, acquired as a lover as much fame as the most famous; for, according to his history, on finding himself rejected by his lady Oriana, who had ordered him not to appear in her presence until it should be her pleasure, all he did was to retire to the Pena Pobre in company with a hermit, and there he took his fill of weeping until Heaven sent him relief in the midst of his great grief and need. And if this be true, as it is, why should I now take the trouble to strip stark naked, or do mischief to these trees which ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... old one! Yesterday, while we were lagging behind, my royal friend entered yonder hermitage after a deer; and there, as ill-luck would have it, caught sight of a beautiful girl, called [S']akoontala, the hermit's daughter. From that moment, not another thought about returning to the city! and all last night not a wink of sleep did he get for thinking of the damsel. What is to be done? At any rate I will be on the watch for him as soon as ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa

... which were tormenting the country folk. Guy later went off to the Crusades. These were pilgrimages which devout men made to Jerusalem, in the endeavor to win back that city from the Turks. Guy was gone some time from England—years probably—and when he came back, he lived the life of a hermit, in a cave near here. The story goes that his wife used to carry food to him each day, and that she never recognized him until he was dying and revealed to ...
— John and Betty's History Visit • Margaret Williamson

... we found numbers of large hermit-crabs, crawling, or rather running, about in whelk shells, half a dozen of them occasionally having a grand fight amongst themselves. We picked up at least twenty different sorts of gracefully shaped pieces of coral, and quantities of shells of an infinite variety of form and ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey

... characteristics from time immemorial, have acquired mental faculties of which we of the Western and younger civilization are totally ignorant. The Hindu has attained a past master's degree in speculative philosophy. He has for years retired for meditation to the silent places in his land, lived a hermit, subdued the body and developed the mind, thus ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi

... to all the above bodily hardships the lack of one to employ himself in so great charity, to whatever serves in this life as a consolation to the spirit. For there our religious is properly a hermit, although he may live among many people. Now, it is because he is deprived of the company of his brothers, for he is almost always alone in villages that are too large, and the nearest minister is fifteen or twenty leguas ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 41 of 55, 1691-1700 • Various

... Psalter in English, from the early years of the fourteenth century, still exist, one of which was by Richard Rolle, the Yorkshire hermit, who also ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... much better would such stirring monuments be; full of life and commotion; than hermit obelisks of Luxor, and idle towers of stone; which, useless to the world in themselves, vainly hope to eternize a name, by having it carved, solitary and alone, in their granite. Such monuments are cenotaphs indeed; founded ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville

... expression. Also at that period, which Louisa herself in her diary calls the "sentimental period," she was strongly influenced by the poet and naturalist, Thoreau. From him she learned to know Nature in a closer and more loving intimacy. Thoreau was called a hermit, and known as a genius, and more often than not he could be found in his hut in the woods, or on the river bank, where he learned to look for the bright-eyed "Alcott girl," who would swing along his side in twenty-mile tramps, eager and inquisitive about everything, learning new facts about ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser

... evening he entered a valley, and at the head of the valley he came to a hermit's cell, and the hermit welcomed him gladly, and there he spent the night. And in the morning he arose, and when he went forth, behold a shower of snow had fallen the night before, and a hawk had killed a wild fowl in front ...
— The Mabinogion Vol. 1 (of 3) • Owen M. Edwards

... Lake Erie when the veterans who had gone to the "War of Twelve" came home from service with Perry—for in no war that the nation has waged has this hermit people failed of response ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck

... the sound of the trumpet blown before the walls of Jericho, or the Psalms of David denouncing woe upon the enemies of God's chosen people. If there is any purely Puritan strain in American poetry it is in the war-hymns of the Quaker "Hermit of Amesbury." Of these patriotic poems there were three principal collections: Voices of Freedom, 1849; the Panorama and Other Poems, 1856; and In War Time, 1863; Whittier's work as the poet of freedom ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... angry water around the point, and showed us Mackinac in the distance, we discovered that the island was a mutual friend, and that we knew each other, at least by name; for the silver-haired priest was Father Piret, the hermit of the Chenaux. In the old days, when I was living at the little white fort, I had known Father Piret by reputation, and he had heard of me from the French half-breeds around the point. We landed. The summer hotels were closed, and I was directed to the old Agency, ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson

... blackbird and bobolink will fly after you and make the day more delightful to you. And when you go home tired after sundown, vesper sparrow will tell you how grateful we are. When you sit down on your porch after dark, fifebird and hermit thrush and wood thrush will sing to you; and even whip-poor-will will cheer you up a little. We know where we are safe. In a little while all the birds will come to live in Massachusetts again, and ...
— Bird Day; How to prepare for it • Charles Almanzo Babcock

... looked upon any of his own race, whom he encountered in the wilderness, as his friends, and have hastened to welcome them? What could have been more desirable than to unite with them in a country where whites were so scarce, and almost unknown? Was it not contrary to all reason to suppose that a hermit or misanthrope would have penetrated thus far to avoid his brother man, and would have broken his own solitude ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis

... Abenner himself yields to the faith, and after some years of penitence dies. Josaphat surrenders the kingdom to a friend called Barachias and departs for the wilderness. After two years of painful search and much buffeting by demons he finds Barlaam. The latter dies, and Josaphat survives as a hermit many years. King Barachias afterwards arrives, and transfers the bodies of the two saints to India, where they are the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various

... Hermit's Cave is a few miles from Galena, and is so named on account of having been used as a dwelling by its former owner, who kept a coffin in which he intended to place himself before the final summons, but was overtaken by death in the forest and it was never used. He wrote sermons ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen

... was the reply. "Yet they say there's a fortune locked up in that hill. An old hermit showed Sid the place, but it's been most a year since we repaired this old sluiceway which was here before we came and begun washing, and not more than enough to pay expenses have we had out of ...
— Jack Ranger's Western Trip - From Boarding School to Ranch and Range • Clarence Young

... whole People can be said to have any Faith at all; except in things which it can eat and handle. Whensoever it gets any Faith, its history becomes spirit-stirring, note-worthy. But since the time when steel Europe shook itself simultaneously, at the word of Hermit Peter, and rushed towards the Sepulchre where God had lain, there was no universal impulse of Faith that one could note. Since Protestantism went silent, no Luther's voice, no Zisca's drum any longer proclaiming that God's Truth was not the Devil's Lie; and the ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... proposed for her, and gained the consent of the recluse (I am not sure of his name, but I always call him Lord Noirmont) to carry her off. I think this was associated with some affliction that was cured, or some mystery that was solved, and that the hermit returned into the everyday world. I do not know where I read it, but I have always liked the idea of living like Lord Noirmont, when I shall have become a ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock

... Boswell, "not only of high dignity of spirit, such as became her noble blood, but of excellent understanding and lively talents." Under her auspices a poem of Goldsmith's had an aristocratical introduction to the world. This was the beautiful ballad of the Hermit, originally published under the name of Edwin and Angelina. It was suggested by an old English ballad beginning "Gentle Herdsman," shown him by Dr. Percy, who was at that time making his famous collection, entitled ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving

... fulness, my poor story Shall outlive all their age, and all their glory. The hand of danger cannot fall amiss, When I know what, and in whose power, it is, Nor want, the curse of man, shall make me groan: A holy hermit ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald

... little daughter of a gamekeeper to nobility was preparing to emigrate with her father to a new home in the Western world, where she would learn to perform miracles with rifle and revolver, and where the beauty of the hermit thrush's song would startle her into comparing it to the beauty of her own untried voice. But to her father, and to her, the most beautiful thing in all the world was love ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers

... so that they are quite in the dark, and know not what they shall do, or those who can not resist temptations, and find they make themselves worse by being in the world, without making it better, may retire. I never read of a hermit, but in imagination I kiss his feet; never of a monastery, but I could fall on my knees, and kiss the pavement. But I think putting young people there, who know nothing of life, nothing of retirement, is dangerous and wicked. It is a saying as ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell

... remains of the old pueblo were still standing. In 1878 I visited one of the ground-rooms in the old structure still standing, and entirely alone. It was about five feet by six in ground-dimensions, and was then occupied by a solitary Taos Indian, a sort of hermit, as his place of residence. A bunk across one side furnished him both a bed and a seat, and the remaining room was scarcely sufficient to turn around in, but it gave him all the home he had, and, doubtless, all the room he needed. Another room, ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan

... scentless, growing hidden and neglected among the rocks of the mountain-road, suggested to Basho[u] the life of the Buddhist hermit, and thus this poem becomes an exhortation to "shun the world, if ...
— Japanese Prints • John Gould Fletcher

... speaker is the wise old hermit Trevrizent, who has cleared up for Parzival the mystery of the Grail and led him to inward peace. 6: In Book 6 it is related that Parzival, riding away from the castle of the Grail, comes upon three drops of blood in the snow—the blood of a wild goose ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas

... follow O'er the grass-grown brace in the summer day; And the corn springs high in the cracks and corners Of the forge, and down where the timber lies; And the crows are perched like a band of mourners On the broken hut on the Hermit's Rise. ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens

... comfort shed; Sweet Hope, support his aged head; And Charity, avert the burning dart! Fruitless the prayer—the night of deeper woes Seems o'er the head even now to close; In vain the path of purity he trod, In vain, in vain, He poured from Fancy's shell his sweetest hermit strain— He has no hope on earth: forsake ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles

... and the boys had to get their own meals. As one after another of the lingerers left, the dormitory became quieter, almost oppressively lonesome, to Bill at least, who was social by nature; but Gus, the hermit, rather enjoyed it. ...
— Radio Boys Loyalty - Bill Brown Listens In • Wayne Whipple

... Anthony, one day when he was wide awake, saw the soul of the hermit St. Ammon being carried into heaven in the midst of choirs of angels. Now, St. Ammon died that same day, at five days' journey from thence, in the desert of Nitria. The same St. Anthony saw also the soul of St. Paul Hermitus ascending to heaven surrounded by choirs of angels ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet

... is the mirrour of life; that he who has mazed his imagination, in following the phantoms which other writers raise up before him, may here be cured of his delirious extasies, by reading human sentiments in human language, by scenes from which a hermit may estimate the transactions of the world, and a confessor predict the progress of ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot

... presentation and dressing apart, not so very different from the general temper of man after the break up of the Roman peace till the more or less definite mapping out of Europe into modern divisions. More than one Vivien and one William of Orange listened to Peter the Hermit. In the very isolation of the atmosphere of these romances, in its distance from modern thought and feeling, in its lack (as some have held) of universal quality and transcendent human interest, there is a certain element of strength. It was not above its time, and it therefore does not reach ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury

... over again that voice breaks in upon the slumbrous torpor of Israel and smites the dead souls of priests and people alike. Now it is a Balaam, now it is an Elijah, a David, an Isaiah, a John the Baptist, a Paul the Apostle, a Peter the Hermit, a Savonarola, a Huss, a Whitefield, a Wesley, a Frederick Maurice, a Frederick Robertson, a ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser

... it is dusky, And the hermit thrush and the black and white warbler Are singing and answering together. There is sweetness in the tree, And fireflies are counting the leaves. I like this country, I like the way it has, But I cannot forget my dream I had of the sea, The gulls ...
— Poems By a Little Girl • Hilda Conkling

... little closed porthole, this barricade against the invader, this trap-door raised by a push when the time has come for the hermit to enter the world. Shall we credit it to the Bruchus? Did the ingenious insect conceive the undertaking? Did it think out a plan and work out a scheme of its own devising? This would be no small triumph for the ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent

... price. Cheap no-one would buy. Caviare. Do the grand. Hock in green glasses. Swell blowout. Lady this. Powdered bosom pearls. The elite. Creme de la creme. They want special dishes to pretend they're. Hermit with a platter of pulse keep down the stings of the flesh. Know me come eat with me. Royal sturgeon high sheriff, Coffey, the butcher, right to venisons of the forest from his ex. Send him back the half ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... inclines his head (cleverly foreshortened and marvellously expressed) and extends his arms to the Redeemer; St. Zenobi (or St. Ambrose the archbishop) standing upright, points with his right to the Saviour; St. Jerome, in hermit's dress, bends forward and clasps his hands in prayer; St. Augustine holds his pen in one hand, his book and pastoral staff in the other; St. Francis brings his hand to his brow in an attitude of melancholy indefinable sadness. ...
— Fra Angelico • J. B. Supino

... thought of it all, and find it entirely to my taste. I tell you, Miles, I should be exactly in my sphere, in this island, and that as a hermit. I do not say I should not like some company, if it could be yourself, or Talcott, or the Major, or even Neb; but no company is better than bad; and as for asking, or allowing any one to stay with me, it is ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper

... many of them were drowned. The river, when we passed, had no appearance of being capable of this tremendous force: it resembled a little brook, in which a shallow stream of very transparent water rolled over a bed of gravel. "How happy might an hermit be," said Mademoiselle St. Sillery, "in a cottage on the side of one of those hills! There is a wood for him to walk in, and a brook to encourage him, by its soft murmurs, to sleep." I agreed in the observation which exactly characterizes ...
— Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808 • Lt-Col. Pinkney

... lead. Work—work—work; that's all right, it's amusing; but I want women about me and I want pleasure. John Knox had a better time of it than I, with his godly females all leaving their husbands to follow after him; I would I were John Knox; I hate living like a hermit. Write me a nice letter if ever you are in the humour to write to me, and it doesn't hurt your head. Good-bye.—Ever ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... no mortal sin is to be found in a perfect man. But sloth is to be found in a perfect man: for Cassian says (De Instit. Caenob. x, l) that "sloth is well known to the solitary, and is a most vexatious and persistent foe to the hermit." Therefore sloth is not always a ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas

... so kind and sympathetic in time of sickness that he was always welcome. But he had not visited Duncan Polite very often, though the old man had been ill all winter. Ever since the night John Egerton had heard him wrestling in prayer, and had guessed dimly at what manner of man the silent old hermit was, he had felt uncomfortable in his presence. But to-night he realised that he should not pass without dropping in just a moment to ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith

... the exact words at the moment, but they are to this effect: 'If you can't stop the wind from blowing, neither can you prevent evil thoughts from entering your mind.' I daresay the thing that occurred to you wasn't actually evil in the sense which the hermit meant, but it is pretty sure to have been foolish; and that, for all practical purposes, is the same thing. By the way, this is excellent bacon; quite the best I've tasted for a long time. ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham

... bridal—even so!" And from the sand he took a silver shell, That had been wasted by the fall and swell Of many a moon-borne tide into a ring— A rude, rude ring; it was a snow-white thing, Where a lone hermit limpet slept and died, In ages far away. "Thou art a bride, Sweet Agathe! Wake up; we must not linger." He press'd the ring upon her chilly finger, And to the sea-bird, on its sunny stone, Shouted, "Pale priest! thou liest all alone Upon ...
— The Death-Wake - or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras • Thomas T Stoddart

... sound. Travel had given him a wider outlook than most of his colleagues possessed. He was the enemy of espaolismo, wanted his nation to take a prominent part in European affairs, and no longer to lead the life of a hermit nation. But he is no jingo. He speaks against the bill to add fifty thousand to the standing army. Spain had passed through too many upheavals. What she needed to make her a European power was tranquility ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup

... and a water-nymph, abandoned by her parents, and brought up by a hermit. One day, King Dushyanta came to the hermitage, and persuaded Sakuntala to marry him. In due time a son was born, but Dushyanta left his bride at the hermitage. When the boy was six years old, his mother took him to the king, and Dushyanta recognized his wife by a ring ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer

... be identified from any other by the reddish brown tail which is in marked contrast to the color of the back. The nesting habits and eggs of this species are precisely like those of the eastern Hermit Thrush, which is a ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed

... answered he, with a smile; "since your father is not a hermit, nor a small person on this ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)

... was a complete abandonment of secular duties and cares and a complete subjugation of the body. A vast literature of legends arose reflecting and glorifying the prevailing ideal and holding up the hermit life as the supreme pattern of perfection, and this literature occupies a place in mediaevalism very similar to that held by the 'Lives' ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky

... popular under their French, English, or Italian shape, such as the lay of the "Oiselet,"[272] the "Chienne qui pleure," or the Weeping Bitch, the lay of Aristotle, the Geese of Friar Philip, the Pear Tree, the Hermit who got drunk. Some of them are very indecent, but they were not left out of the collections on that account, any more than miniaturists were forbidden to paint on the margins of holy, or almost holy books, scenes that were far from being so. A manuscript of the decretals, ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand

... took its rise from the piety and liberality of a Sienese noble, Bernardo Tolomei, who, with two companions, Ambrogio Piccolomini and Patricio Patrizzi, established himself as a hermit on a barren point of land at Chiusuri, some miles from Siena, in the same manner as did S. Benedict at Subiaco. This was in 1312, but the Papal charter by which the Order was founded dates from 1319. It was called "Monte Oliveto," from ...
— Intarsia and Marquetry • F. Hamilton Jackson

... gazed down at his blithe guest. "To see somebody, somebody, once again, is very pleasant to a hermit!" ...
— Padre Ignacio - Or The Song of Temptation • Owen Wister

... There, in this "hermit's retreat," as he himself has defined it, the sage is voluntarily sequestered; a true saint of science, an ascetic living only on fruits, vegetables, and a little wine; so in love with retirement that even in the village he was for a long time almost unknown, so careful was he to go round ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros

... The yet it were a doubt, whether thou mightest possess her, for Ygaerne is chaste, a woman most true; so was her mother, and more of the kin. In sooth I thee say, dearest of all kings, that otherwise thou must begin, if thou wilt win her. For yesterday came to me a good hermit, and swore by his chin, that he knew Merlin, where he each night resteth under heaven, and oft he spake with him, and stories him told. And if we might with art get Merlin, then mightest thou thy will ...
— Brut • Layamon

... The Maryland Yellow-Throat The Whip-Poor-Will Wings of a Dove The Hermit Thrush Sea-Gulls of Manhattan The Ruby-Crowned Kinglet The Angler's Reveille A November Daisy The ...
— Songs Out of Doors • Henry Van Dyke

... the Bard sleep here indeed? Or is it but a groundless creed? What matters it? I blame them not Whose Fancy in this lonely Spot 20 Was moved; and in this way express'd Their notion of it's perfect rest. A Convent, even a hermit's Cell Would break the silence of this Dell: It is not quiet, is not ease; But something deeper far than these: The separation that is here Is of the grave; and of austere And happy feelings of the dead: And, therefore, was it rightly said 30 That Ossian, last of ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 2 • William Wordsworth

... pair of eyes that seemed to reflect the very blue and white of a June sky. No doubt she had thought to breast the hills and sail the seas again in some renaissance of vigour. No doubt her "retreat," like a Roman Catholic's, was designed to be merely temporary. She aped the hermit for the sake of a sojourn in the hermitage. She came to her island of Avalon to be restored of her weary limbs and her blistered feet, so to speak; and there her heart, too weak for her spirit, failed her, and she fell amongst the ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes

... many years afterward the orator was the greatest of leaders. By the magic of his eloquence he changed the views of men and inspired them to deeds of valor. The fiery orations of a Demosthenes, of a Cicero; the thrilling words of a Peter the Hermit or a Savonarola; the unanswerable arguments of a Burke or a Webster, have more than once ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester

... into a kind of hermit after that, and I wasn't good to associate with. Men got so they shunned me, and I knew they told strange stories, because I heard them whisper when I went to the stores for grub once a month. I changed all over, till even my ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach

... in 718. In this engagement, the Leinster men only numbered nine thousand, while their opponents numbered twenty-one thousand. The Leinster men, however, made up for numbers by their valour; and it is said that the intervention of a hermit, who reproached Fearghal with breaking the pacific promise of his predecessor, contributed to the defeat of the northern forces. Another battle took place in 733, when Hugh Allan, King of Ireland, and Hugh, son of Colgan, King of Leinster, engaged in single combat. The latter was slain, and the ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack

... Guy grieved for the loss of his three friends, but most of all for his dear master Sir Heraud. He sought about the wood until he found a hermit. To him he gave a good steed, charging him to bury the bodies of Sir Urry and Sir Thorold. From Sir Heraud's body he would not part. Lifting the old knight to his arms, he laid him across his horse, and led the steed by the bridle-rein till they came to an abbey, where he left the body ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie

... finished his account of the exploits of Captain Samuel Barrows Hardy, even the envious Lightfoot regarded Rufus with a new respect, for there is no higher honor in Arizona than to be the son of an Indian fighter. And when the last man had crawled wearily into his blankets the old hermit still sat by the dying fire poking the charred ends into the flames and holding forth to the young superintendent upon the ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge

... continued Mr. Vance, turning to Diggory, "that our next-door neighbour is called 'The Hermit.' He's a queer old fellow, who lives by himself, and never makes friends or speaks to any one. He's supposed to be very clever, and I've heard it said that he's got a very valuable collection of coins, and ...
— The Triple Alliance • Harold Avery

... of these matters. Thus, then, it came to pass that no more need Atoua go forth to seek food and water, for the people brought it—more than was needful, for I would receive no fee. Now at first, fearing lest some in the hermit Olympus might know the lost Harmachis, I would only meet those who came in the darkness of the tomb. But afterwards, when I learned how it was held through all the land that Harmachis was certainly no more, I came forth and sat in the mouth of the tomb, and ministered to the sick, and at times ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard

... departed, and went till they came to a hermit, that was a good man and a great leech. So the hermit searched all his wounds, and applied good salves; and the king was there three days, and then were his wounds well amended, that he might ride and go. So they departed, and as they rode Arthur said, ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch

... embossed figures and landscapes. Having made the original designs for these, I have the originals before me now; they were produced by Goodall and Son. Seeing a growing want, and the great sale obtained abroad, this house produced (1868) a "Little Red Riding Hood," a "Hermit and his Cell," and many other subjects in which snow and the robin played a part.' We fail to see how a card issued in 1862 can ante-date the production of 1846, a copy of which is in our possession; and although there is no copyright in an idea, the title to the honour of originating the pretty ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton

... entered into conversation with the Hermit (a Bairagi from the Upper Provinces), and learned from him that he had adopted a life of abstraction and isolation from the world, neither to expiate any sin, nor to secure any reward. He averred that he had no desires and no hopes, but that, being removed ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams

... Peter the Hermit, returning from a pilgrimage, by command of the Pope went throughout Europe proclaiming the desecration of the holy places. At a council held at Clermont in France, 1095, the first Crusade was proclaimed by Urban II. Led by Peter the Hermit, a vast undisciplined host, ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele

... the Franciscan order and its branches, see VOL. XX, p. 91. The Capuchins were originally Observantine Franciscans, and date from 1526, when their founder, Matteo di Bassi, of Urbino, Italy, obtained papal consent to live, with his companions, a hermit life, wear a habit with long pointed cowl (capuche, whence their name), and preach the gospel in all lands. At first they were subject to the general of the conventual Franciscans, not obtaining exemption from this obedience until 1617. Early in the eighteenth century the Capuchins numbered 25,000 ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various

... his years of infernal durance in hunting and minstrelsy, and in converse with fair women. The world of the Mabinogion is a world of pure phantasy, a new earth of marvels and enchantments, of dark forests whose silence is broken by the hermit's bell and sunny glades where the light plays on the hero's armour. Each figure as it moves across the poet's canvas is bright with glancing colour. "The maiden was clothed in a robe of flame-coloured silk, and about her neck was a collar of ruddy gold in which ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green

... the Prince, in despair, determined to search through the world till he found her. He flew on and on for several days, till he came to a great desert, where he saw a cavern, and, to his delight, there sat Celia, sharing the simple breakfast of an old hermit. ...
— The Blue Fairy Book • Various

... present not of the family connection was my quondam correspondent in America, Arthur Helps. Somehow or other I had formed the impression from his writings that he was a venerable sage of very advanced years, who contemplated life as an aged hermit, from the door of his cell. Conceive my surprise to find a genial young gentleman of about twenty-five, who looked as if he might enjoy a joke as well ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe

... a violent dislike to me on account of this opposition to his last application, although, of course, I had nothing whatever to do with the matter. He lived like a hermit, mostly in the library, and was waited upon by an old man and his wife, and these three were the only inhabitants of a mansion that could comfortably house a hundred. He visited nobody, and would ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr

... midnight moon should lave Her forehead in the silver wave, How solemn on the ear would come The holy matins' distant hum, While the deep peal's commanding tone Should wake, in yonder islet lone, A sainted hermit from his cell, To drop a bead with every knell! And bugle, lute, and bell, and all, Should each bewildered stranger call To friendly feast and ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott

... can see now that my life has been misspent. I should have remained at home and made my wife and children happy. Instead, I became, virtually, a hermit, and for more than twenty years I have thought only of myself and done nothing for humanity, that has ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin

... one breathes air so thick and foul that it sticks to one's clothes and furs one's tongue, throat and lungs for several hours after one has emerged from the catacombs into fresh air again. Yet there are hermit monks who spend their lives underground without ever coming up to the light, and in doing so become bony, discoloured, ghastly creatures, with staring, inspired eyes and hollow cheeks, half demented to all appearance, ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor

... quilt sinks with becoming woe, Wrapped in a gown, for sickness, and for show. The fair ones feel such maladies as these, When each new night-dress gives a new disease. A constant vapour o'er the palace flies; Strange phantoms rising as the mists arise; Dreadful as hermit's dreams in haunted shades, Or bright as visions of expiring maids. Now glaring fiends, and snakes on rolling spires, Pale spectres, gaping tombs, and purple fires: Now lakes of liquid gold, Elysian scenes, And crystal ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley

... the three had the slightest particle of the hermit. Not one of them, but would have shuddered at the thought of becoming a Simon Stylites. You might suppose that, with books and Nature to study, Karl could have made shift. True, with such companions he might have lived ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid

... their wallets, decline on the plea of anorexia. Near the Capucins is the Church of San Giovanni, a singularly wild spot, in the midst of bad air, and within reach of the Ear of Dionysius. We descend with a fellow filthier than the filthiest Capucin, calling himself a hermit, to guide us in the vast catacombs over which the hermitage stands. It was a trial to follow him—the rank woollen dress, uncleansed till it falls to pieces, diffuses an odour which, in such confined passages, is particularly unpleasant. Cleanliness, says an English proverb, is next to godliness; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various

... with his wife,—and after she was dead! Shut up like a hermit in order to paint her with a beauty which she had never had. Life brings surprises, but this surely ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... said he, "the cave where dwelt a holy hermit of great reputation for wisdom and learning. He sate him down before the entrance, and listened with patience and fortitude to the grave and weighty saws which like bats increase in darkness. Having presently earned the right of a disciple, he plied the sage with questions, ...
— Atma - A Romance • Caroline Augusta Frazer

... in that!" said Burkin. "There are plenty of people in the world, solitary by temperament, who try to retreat into their shell like a hermit crab or a snail. Perhaps it is an instance of atavism, a return to the period when the ancestor of man was not yet a social animal and lived alone in his den, or perhaps it is only one of the diversities of human character—who knows? I am not a natural science man, ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... nature for a word, as for a man, to live the life of a hermit. Through external compulsion or internal characteristics a word has contacts with its fellows. And its most intimate, most spontaneous associations are normally with ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor

... seated, each leaning on his stick, apparently in earnest conversation; all these are roughly, but with great accuracy, formed upon the numerous pillars which support a room or two above. The last object you arrive at is a hermit as large as life seated in his cell, with one book beside him and another on his knee, upon which his left hand is placed; his right is laid across his breast. The pillars are so contrived that the little cavern is light in every part; at ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al

... What a slave and a fool whisky can make of a man!" he thought. Then he remembered Dennie's anxiety of the morning. "There must be some cause for his prejudice against this strange hermit woman when he is drunk. Bond Saxon is not a man to hate anybody when he ...
— A Master's Degree • Margaret Hill McCarter

... captivity here, as you see. In solitude, in a cavern, like a ghost or a bogey. Drink! She carried me off and locked me up, and—well, I am living here, in the deserted bath house, like a hermit. I am fed. Next week I think I'll try to get out. I'm tired ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne

... poverty-stricken Indians who still sought to prolong life in their old home. One Sunday morning, while saying mass in the little church, the enfeebled and aged padre fell before the altar and immediately expired. As it had been reported that he was "leading a hermit's life and destitute of means," it was commonly believed that this worthy and devoted missionary was exhausted from lack of proper food, and ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James

... says, "What, then, is the Inquisition of the nineteenth century? The same system of intolerance which prevailed in the barbarous ages. That which raised the Crusade and roused all Europe to arms at the voice of a monk [Footnote: Bernard of Chiaravalle.] and of a hermit, [Footnote: Peter the Hermit.] That which—in the name of a God of peace, manifested on earth by Christ, who, through love for sinners, gave himself to be crucified—brought slaughter on the Albigenses and the Waldenses; filled France ...
— Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal • Sarah J Richardson

... Mr. Monk, "I live myself so much like a hermit that your house is a palace of luxury to me." Then he felt that he had made a foolish speech, and he also hated himself. He found it very difficult to talk to his hostess upon any subject, until by chance he mentioned his young friend ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope

... when I was at home, I lived like a hermit, all alone; having a pretty large house, and nobody in it but myself, at nights especially. But an elderly woman, whose father had been an old servant to the family, came every morning, and made my bed; and did what else I had occasion for her to do: till I fell ill ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe

... the ocean, saddened by the memory of Napoleon, its involuntary hermit. But the dead lion no longer reposes there; his remains have been transferred to one of his own splendid monuments in unfaithful but now penitent Paris; and the spirit of prophecy must have prompted the pen of Byron to write, long before the event ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay

... forgive these friendly Rhimes, For raking in the dunghill of their crimes. To name each Monster wou'd make Printing dear, Or tire Ned Ward, who writes six Books a-year. Such vicious Nonsense, Impudence, and Spite, Wou'd make a Hermit, or a Father write. Tho' Julian rul'd the World, and held no more Than deist Gildon taught, or Toland swore, Good Greg'ry[48] prov'd him execrably bad, And scourg'd his Soul, with drunken Reason ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte

... that they never feared the forest, nor all the boars and wolves that were in it. But being weary, they wished for some place of shelter, and took a green path through the trees, thinking it might lead to the dwelling of some hermit or forester. ...
— Granny's Wonderful Chair • Frances Browne

... at the dwelling of a holy hermit. It was hewn out of the living rock; there was a cross over the door, and before it was a great spreading oak, with a sweet spring of water at its foot. The body of the faithful servant who had fallen in the defence of his lord, was buried close by the wall of this ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving

... of solitude is carried to the extreme in his contemplation of a hermit's life. In a letter to Nast he says: "Heute ging ich so vor mich hin, da fiel mir ein, ich wolle nach vollendeten Universitaets Jahren Einsiedler werden—und der Gedanke gefiel mir so wohl, eine ganze Stunde, glaub' ich, war ich in ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun

... father. [Footnote] He was a man of extraordinary learning in the academic sense of the word, and possessed still more extraordinary general knowledge. He lived for many years the strangest kind of hermit life, surrounded by his books and old manuscripts. His two great passions were philology and occultism. He knew more, I think, of those strange writers discussed in Vaughan's Hours with the Mystics than any other person—including, perhaps, Vaughan himself; but he managed to combine with ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton

... to skin and bones were not as bad as a fever. In short, he starves me to death; so that, when I thought, as being a governor, to have plenty of good hot victuals and cool liquor, and to repose on a soft feather-bed, I am come to do penance like a hermit. ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... to give orders, sir, that a poor hermit is to be admitted, just come from the Desert, and who is instructed to beg for contributions ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac

... Marc.) says that "it is related of the Blessed Mark* that after receiving the faith he cut off his thumb that he might be excluded from the priesthood." [*This prologue was falsely ascribed to St. Jerome, and the passage quoted refers, not to St. Mark the Evangelist, but to a hermit of that name. (Cf. Baronius, Anno Christi, 45, num. XLIV)] Likewise some take a vow never to accept a bishopric. Now to place an obstacle to a thing amounts to the same as refusing it altogether. Therefore ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas

... Margaret. I am not living in a talking, babbling world, nor yet among people who are trying to worm facts out of me; you needn't look so frightened because you have let the cat out of the bag to a faithful old hermit like me. I shall never name his having been in England; I shall be out of temptation, for no one will ask me. Stay!' (interrupting himself rather abruptly) 'was it at ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... with this character; leisurely, unambitious, and brief, but in beauty of voice and in high musical quality excelling all other music of the woods. However, I would not exaggerate, and I have not found even these thrushes perfect. The hermit, who is my favorite of the four, has a habit of slowly raising and depressing his tail when his mind is disturbed—a trick of which it is likely he is unconscious, but which, to say the least, is not a mark of good breeding; and the Wilson, while every note of ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey

... dawn, and it is fifteen good miles or more. I want to roll against a log somewhere and sleep a bit, and it is now after ten o'clock. Go get your bundle, and I'll hang it on my stick, and we will disappear into the forest forever. I know a hermit who'll put us in marriage bonds. Come!" As he held out his arms Adam began to chant the weird tune to that mate song of ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess

... streaks of day Along the melancholy West fade slow. High o'er his head, the restless pines complain, As on their summit rolls the breeze of night; Beneath, the hoarse stream chides the rocks in vain: The Pilgrim pauses on the dizzy height. Then to the vale his cautious step he prest, For there a hermit's cross was dimly seen, Cresting the rock, and there his limbs might rest, Cheer'd in the good man's cave, by faggot's sheen, On leafy beds, nor guile his sleep molest. Unhappy Luke! he trusts a treacherous clue! Behind the cliff the lurking ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe

... slept he gave praise to Mary, Queen of Heaven. He sought the shriving of the hermit-priest. He ends the story because he hears "the little vesper bell" which bids him to prayer. When you read his "Hymn Before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamounix" you find yourself reading the Nineteenth Psalm. He calls on the motionless ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee

... kind of crab that likes to live in a shell; so if they find one empty, they take possession of it; they are called "hermit crabs." We often used to pick up a shell ...
— Scenes in the Hawaiian Islands and California • Mary Evarts Anderson

... many months have elapsed. Solitary and sad, I live as a hermit in these walls, despised by the whole world, disgusting even to the beasts; the beauties of nature are shut from me, since I am blind by day, and, only when the moon pours her pale light over these walls, does the veil of darkness fall from ...
— What the Animals Do and Say • Eliza Lee Follen

... hermitages in this parish; the last hermit was well remembered by one Thomas Cooke, a very ancient inhabitant, who in my younger years acquainted ...
— William Lilly's History of His Life and Times - From the Year 1602 to 1681 • William Lilly

... 1800, at Torrington, Connecticut, was born a man who lived for two generations, but accomplished the work of two centuries. That man was John Brown, who ranks among the world's greatest heroes. Greater than Peter the Hermit, who believed himself commissioned of God to redeem the Holy Sepulchre from the hands of infidels; greater than Joanna Southcote, who deemed herself big with the promised Shiloh; greater than Ignatius Loyola, who thought the Son of Man ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams

... just listen to me, and I am sure that you will leave me in peace. In a few moments, when we get to the station, you will see the Princess de Raynes and Countess Hermit waiting for me with their husbands. I wished them to see us, and to know that we had spent the night together in the railway-carriage. Don't be alarmed; they will tell it everywhere as a most ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant

... stalagmites. In the middle is a pond called "The Nymph's Bath," with slightly acidulated and intensely cold water. A legend, which goes back to the tenth century, says that a dragon lived here, going out at night and slaughtering men and women. The hermit S. Hilarion attacked and burnt it, calling on the people to thank God, and declaring that it was the Devil. According to one tradition AEsculapius was born in Epidaurus of a beautiful Dalmatian, Jupiter being his father. His statue, ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson

... hermit. Though subject, by divine dispensation, to spells of fervour and apathy, like a singing bird, it is at first quite unconcerned about its own conditions or maintenance. To acquire a notion of such matters, ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... ARGUMENT A hermit parts, by means of hollow sprite, The two redoubted rivals' dangerous play; Rinaldo goes where Love and Hope invite, But is dispatched by Charles another way; Bradamont, seeking her devoted knight, The good Rogero, nigh becomes the prey Of Pinabel, who drops the damsel brave Into ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto



Words linked to "Hermit" :   solitudinarian, hermitical, St. John the Baptist, lone wolf, lone hand, loner, John the Baptist, eremite



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