Books are a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from the vulgarities of the actual world.

Pater’s line casts reading as a deliberate withdrawal from the coarseness and noise of ordinary social life. Calling books a “cloistral refuge” likens the act of reading to entering a monastery: a protected interior space devoted to contemplation, refinement, and the cultivation of sensibility. The phrase also reflects Pater’s aestheticism—his belief that art and culture can offer an alternative order of experience, one governed by nuance and discrimination rather than public vulgarity. At the same time, the metaphor is slightly ambivalent: a cloister shelters and elevates, but it also separates, hinting at the costs of retreat and the tension between cultivated inwardness and engagement with the world.