I. THE GRANDE CHARTREUSE 479

father and me, I must refer to what I said above of our common feeling of being, both of us, as compared with my mother, reprobate and worldly characters,¹ despising our birthright like Esau, or cast out, for our mocking ways, like Ishmael. For my father never ventured to give me a religious lesson; and though he went to church with a resigned countenance, I knew very well that he liked going just as little as I did.

5. The second and fourth summers after that, 1842 and 1844, were spent happily and quietly in the Prieuré* of Chamouni, and there of course we all of us became acquainted with the curé, and saw the entire manner of life in a purely Catholic village and valley,-recognizing it, I hope, all of us, in our hearts, to be quite as Christian as anything we knew of, and much pleasanter and prettier than the Sunday services, in England, which exhaust the little faith we have left.

Wordsworth, in his continental notices of peasant Catholicism, recognizes, also at Chamouni, very gracefully this external prettiness:-

“They too, who send so far a holy gleam,

As they the Church engird with motion slow,

A product of that awful Mountain seem

Poured from its vaults of everlasting snow.

Not virgin lilies marshalled in bright row,

Not swans descending with the stealthy tide,

A livelier sisterly resemblance show

Than the fair Forms that in long order glide

Bear to the glacier band, those Shapes aloft descried.”²

But on me, the deeper impression was of a continuous and serene hold of their happy faith on the life alike of Sunday and Monday, and through every hour and circumstance of

* Not in the Priory itself, but the Hôtel de l’Union. The whole village is called “The Priory.”

¹ [See above, p. 95; and for the Bible references, see Genesis xxv. 34, xxi. 9, 10.]

² [Memorials of a Tour on the Continent, 1820: xxxii. (“Processions. Suggested by a Sabbath Morning in the Vale of Chamouny”).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]