The Annotated 'Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes'/Our Lady Of The Snows

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Our Lady Of The Snows

‘I behold

The House, the Brotherhood austere—

And what am I, that I am here?’^[1]

--Matthew Arnold

[edit] Notes

1. ↑ Line 64 from Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse, first published in Fraser's Magazine (April 1855). The Grande Chartreuse of the poem title is the head monastery for the Carthusian order, situated in a wild and almost inaccessible valley, 4,000 feet above the sea, not far from Grenoble in south-eastern France. Famously, English poet Matthew Arnold wrote one of his finest poems while staying at the monastery. The quiet, serenity, and piety of the place contrasted with what he saw as the violent emerging age of machinery, and the monastic calm became, for him, the sussurations of a dying world.