Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes.
France: Vols. IX–X. 1876–79.
Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse
By Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)T
With rain, where thick the crocus blows,
Past the dark forges long disused,
The mule-track from St. Laurent goes.
The bridge is crossed, and slow we ride,
Through forest, up the mountain-side.
The wind is up, and drives the rain;
While hark! far down, with strangled sound
Doth the Dead Guiers’ stream complain,
Where that wet smoke among the woods
Over his boiling caldron broods.
Past limestone scars with ragged pines,
Showing, then blotting from our sight.
Halt! through the cloud-drift something shines!
High in the valley, wet and drear,
The huts of Courrerie appear.
Mounts up the stony forest-way.
At last the encircling trees retire;
Look! through the showery twilight gray
What pointed roofs are these advance?
A palace of the kings of France?
Alight, and sparely sup, and wait
For rest in this outbuilding near;
Then cross the sward, and reach that gate;
Knock; pass the wicket! Thou art come
To the Carthusians’ world-famed home.
Into their stone-carved basins cold
The splashing icy fountains play;
The humid corridors behold,
Where, ghostlike in the deepening night,
Cowled forms brush by in gleaming white.
Invests the stern and naked prayer.
With penitential cries they kneel
And wrestle; rising then, with bare
And white uplifted faces stand,
Passing the Host from hand to hand.
Is buried in his cowl once more.
The cells,—the suffering Son of Man
Upon the wall! the knee-worn floor!
And, where they sleep, that wooden bed,
Which shall their coffin be, when dead.
Not to feed priestly pride are there,
To hymn the conquering march of Rome,—
Nor yet to amuse, as ours are.
They paint of souls the inner strife,
Their drops of blood, their death in life.
Those fragrant herbs are flowering there!
Strong children of the Alpine wild
Whose culture is the brethren’s care,
Of human tasks their only one,
And cheerful works beneath the sun.
Each its own pilgrim host of old,
From England, Germany, or Spain,
All are before me! I behold
The house, the brotherhood austere!
And what am I, that I am here?
And purged its faith, and calmed its fire,
Showed me the high white star of truth,
There bade me gaze, and there aspire.
Even now their whispers pierce the gloom:
“What dost thou in this living tomb?”
At whose behest I long ago
So much unlearnt, so much resigned!
I come not here to be your foe.
I seek these anchorites, not in ruth,
To curse and to deny your truth;
But as on some far northern strand,
Thinking of his own gods, a Greek
In pity and mournful awe might stand
Before some fallen runic stone,—
For both were faiths, and both are gone.
The other powerless to be born,
With nowhere yet to rest my head,
Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.
Their faith, my tears, the world deride;
I come to shed them at their side.
Ye solemn seats of holy pain!
Take me, cowled forms, and fence me round,
Till I possess my soul again!
Till free my thoughts before me roll,
Not chafed by hourly false control.
But a dead time’s exploded dream;
My melancholy, sciolists say,
Is a past mode, an outworn theme;—
As if the world had ever had
A faith, or sciolists been sad.
At least, the restlessness, the pain,—
Be man henceforth no more a prey
To these outdated stings again!
The nobleness of grief is gone,—
Ah, leave us not the fret alone!
Last of the race of them who grieve,
Here leave us to die out with these
Last of the people who believe!
Silent, while years engrave the brow;
Silent,—the best are silent now.
The kings of modern thought are dumb;
Silent they are, though not content,
And wait to see the future come.
They have the grief men had of yore,
But they contend and cry no more.
This sea of time whereon we sail;
Their voices were in all men’s ears
Who passed within their puissant hail.
Still the same ocean round us raves,
But we stand mute and watch the waves.
And outcry of the former men?
Say, have their sons obtained more joys?
Say, is life lighter now than then?
The sufferers died, they left their pain;
The pangs which tortured them remain.
With haughty scorn which mocked the smart,
Through Europe to the Ætolian shore
The pageant of his bleeding heart?
That thousands counted every groan,
And Europe made his woe her own?
Carried thy lovely wail away,
Musical through Italian trees
That fringe thy soft blue Spezzian bay?—
Inheritors of thy distress,
Have restless hearts one throb the less?
O Obermann! the sad, stern page
Which tells us how thou hidd’st thy head
From the fierce tempest of thine age
In the lone brakes of Fontainebleau,
Or châlets near the Alpine snow?
The world, which for an idle day
Grace to your mood of sadness gave,
Long since hath flung her weeds away.
The eternal trifler breaks your spell;
But we,—we learnt your lore too well!
More fortunate, alas, than we,
Which without hardness will be sage,
And gay without frivolity.
Sons of the world, O, haste those years;
But, till they rise, allow our tears!
The exulting thunder of your race;
You give the universe your law,
You triumph over time and space.
Your pride of life, your tireless powers,
We mark them, but they are not ours.
Beneath some Old-World abbey wall
Forgotten in a forest-glade
And secret from the eyes of all;
Deep, deep the greenwood round them waves,
Their abbey, and its close of graves.
Oft through the trees they catch a glance
Of passing troops in the sun’s beam,—
Pennon, and plume, and flashing lance!
Forth to the world those lances fare,
To life, to cities, and to war.
Faint bugle-notes from far are borne,
Where hunters gather, stag-hounds bay,
Round some old forest-lodge at morn.
Gay dames are there, in sylvan green;
Laughter and cries,—those notes between!
Make their blood dance and chain their eyes.
That bugle-music on the breeze
Arrests them with a charmed surprise.
Banner, by turns, and bugle woo:
Ye shy recluses, follow too!
“Action and pleasure, will ye roam
Through these secluded dells to cry
And call us? but too late ye come!
Too late for us your call ye blow
Whose bent was taken long ago.
We watch those yellow tapers shine,
Emblems of hope over the grave,
In the high altar’s depth divine;
The organ carries to our ear
Its accents of another sphere.
Of revery, of shade, of prayer,
How should we grow in other ground,
How should we flower in foreign air?—
Pass, banners, pass, and, bugles, cease,
And leave our desert to its peace!”