The marble tomb, the illumined shrine,
Their ineffectual splendour gave:
Where slept in earth the maid divine.
The votive silk was seen to wave.
To her, as to a martyred saint.
His vows the weeping pilgrim poured
The drooping traveller, sad and faint,
Knelt there, and found his strength restored:
To that fair shrine, in solemn hour,
Fond youths and blushing maidens came.
And gathered from its mystic power
A brighter, purer, holier flame:
The lightest heart with awe could feel
The charm her hovering spirit shed
But superstition’s impious zeal
Distilled its venom on the dead!
The illumined shrine has passed away;
The sculptured stone in dust is laid:
But when the midnight breezes play
Amid the barren hazel’s shade,
The lone enthusiast, lingering near,
The youth, whom slighted passion grieves,
Through fancy’s magic spell may hear
A spirit in the whispering leaves;
And dimly see, while mortals sleep,
Sad forms of cloistered maidens move,
The transient dreams of life to weep,
The fading flowers of youth and love!
Note.
A small chapel, and a wall, enclosing an ample space, are all now remaining of the Benedictine nunnery at Godstow. A hazel grows near the chapel, the fruit of which is always apparently perfect, but is invariably found to be hollow.
This nunnery derives its chief interest from having been the burial-place of Rosamond. The principal circumstances of her story are thus related by Stowe: “Rosamond, the fair daughter of Walter lord Clifford, concubine to Henry II., (poisoned by queen Eleanor, as some thought,) died at Woodstock, (A. D. 1177,) where king Henry had made for her a house of wonderful working; so that no man or woman might come to her, but he that was instructed by the king, or such as were right secret with him touching the matter. This house, after some, was named Labyrinthus, or Dædalus work, which was wrought like unto a knot in a garden, called a maze: but it was commonly said, that lastly the queen came to her by a clue of thread, or silk, and so dealt with her, that she lived not long after: but when she was dead, she was buried at Godstow, in a house of nuns, beside Oxford, with these verses upon her tomb:
“Hic jacet in tumbâ, Rosa mundi, non Rosa munda:
Non redolet, sed olet, quæ redolere solet.”
After her death, she appears to have been considered as a saint, from the following inscription on a stone cross, which, Leland says, was erected near the nunnery:
Qui meat huc, oret, signumque salutis adoret,
Utque sibi detur veniam, Rosamunda precetur.
A fanatical priest, Hugh, bishop of Lincoln, visiting the nunnery at Godstow, and observing a tomb covered with silk, and splendidly illuminated, which he found, on inquiry, to be the tomb of Rosamond, commanded her to be taken up, and buried without the church, lest the Christian religion should grow into contempt. This brutal order was instantly obeyed: but “the chaste sisters,” says Speed, “gathered her bones, and put them in a perfumed bag, enclosing them so in lead, and laid them again in the church, under a fair large grave-stone, about whose edges a fillet of brass was inlaid, and thereon written her name and praise: these bones were at the suppression of the nunnery so found.”[237]