"So let me, if you do not shudder at me,
Nor shun to call me sister, dwell with you;
Wear black and white, and be a nun like you;
Fast with your fasts, not feasting with your feasts;
Grieve with your griefs, not grieving at your joys.
Bid not rejoicing; mingle with your rites;
Pray and be prayed for; lie before your shrines;
Do each low office of your holy house;
Walk your dim cloister, and distribute dole
To poor sick people, richer in his eyes
Who ransomed us, and haler, too, than I;
And treat their loathsome hurts, and heal mine own;
And so wear out in almsdeed and in prayer
The sombre close of that voluptuous day
Which wrought the ruin of my lord the king."
Idylls of the King, p. 260.
The hermitage is thus described:
"There lived a knight
Not far from Camelot, now for forty years
A hermit, who had prayed, labored, and prayed.
And ever laboring had scooped himself
In the white rock a chapel and a hall
On massive columns, like a shorecliff cave.
And cells and chambers: all were fair and dry."
Idylls of the King, p. 168.
Among Tennyson's earlier poems, the picture of Isabel, "the perfect wife," with her "hate of gossip parlance, and of sway," her
"locks not wide dispread.
Madonna-wise on either side her head;
Sweet lips whereon perpetually did reign
The summer calm of golden charity;"
and
"Eyes not down-dropt nor over-bright, but fed
With the clear-pointed flame of chastity,"
Poems, pp. 7, 8,
is worthy of a Catholic matron. The description of St. Stephen, in The Two Voices, has all the depth and pathos of the poet's happiest mood; and, though neither it, nor some other passages which have been quoted, contain anything distinctively Catholic as opposed to other forms of Christianity, it is strongly marked with those orthodox instincts to which we are drawing attention:
"I cannot hide that some have striven,
Achieving calm, to whom was given
The joy that mixes man with heaven;
Who, rowing hard against the stream,
Saw distant gates of Eden gleam.
And did not dream it was a dream;
But heard, by secret transport led,
E'en in the charnels of the dead,
The murmur of the fountain-head—
Which did accomplish their desire,
Bore and forbore, and did not tire;
Like Stephen, an unquenched fire,
He heeded not reviling tones.
Nor sold his heart to idle moans.
Though cursed, and scorned, and bruised with stones;
But looking upward, full of grace.
He prayed, and from a happy place
God's glory smote him on the face."
Poems, p. 299.