from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- Shut close; confined; without vent.
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The close-pent crowd beat time with hand and foot, and sometimes this rude accompaniment almost drowned the music: --
Why do civic wood-rangers choose the ailantus-tree for a bouquet-holder to the close-pent inhabitants of towns?
-- and the confusion swelled to a mighty roar, close-pent under the heavy mists blued by the naphtha-torches.
Similarly Quixotic would be any tirade against pews, those pet strongholds of snug exclusive selfishness; bad in principle, as perpetually separating within wooden walls members of the same communion; unwholesome in practice, confining in those antre-like parallelograms the close-pent air; unsightly in appearance, as any one will testify, whose soul is exalted above the iron beauties of a plain conventicle; expensive in their original formation, their fittings and repairs; and, when finished, occupying perhaps one-fourth of the area of
For while Chaucer's intercourse with the busy world, and collision with the actual passions and conflicting interests of others, seemed to brace the sinews of his understanding, and gave to his writings the air of a man who describes persons and things that he had known and been intimately concerned in; the same opportunities, operating on a differently constituted frame, only served to alienate Spenser's mind the more from the "close-pent up" scenes of ordinary life, and to make him "rive their concealing continents," to give himself up to the unrestrained indulgence of "flowery tenderness."