Friar Cuthbert.  Pull the brown hood over your face, Lest you bring me into disgrace!

Abbot.  What means this revel and carouse? 
Is this a tavern and drinking-house? 
Are you Christian monks, or heathen devils,
To pollute this convent with your revels? 
Were Peter Damian still upon earth,
To be shocked by such ungodly mirth,
He would write your names, with pen of gall,
In his Book of Gomorrah, one and all! 
Away, you drunkards! to your cells,
And pray till you hear the matin-bells;
You, Brother Francis, and you, Brother Paul! 
And as a penance mark each prayer
With the scourge upon your shoulders bare;
Nothing atones for such a sin
But the blood that follows the discipline. 
And you, Brother Cuthbert, come with me
Alone into the sacristy;
You, who should be a guide to your brothers,
And are ten times worse than all the others,
For you I’ve a draught that has long been brewing
You shall do a penance worth the doing! 
Away to your prayers, then, one and all! 
I wonder the very, convent wall
Does not crumble and crush you in its fall!

* * * * *

THE NEIGHBORING NUNNERY.

* * * * *

The ABBESS IRMINGARD sitting with ELSIE in the moonlight.

Irmingard The night is silent, the wind is still,
The moon is looking from yonder hill
Down upon convent, and grove, and garden;
The clouds have passed away from her face,
Leaving behind them no sorrowful trace,
Only the tender and quiet grace
Of one, whose heart had been healed with pardon!

And such am I. My soul within
Was dark with passion and soiled with sin. 
But now its wounds are healed again;
Gone are the anguish, the terror, and pain;
For across that desolate land of woe,
O’er whose burning sands I was forced to go,
A wind from heaven began to blow;
And all my being trembled and shook,
As the leaves of the tree, or the grass of the field,
And I was healed, as the sick are healed,
When fanned by the leaves of the Holy Book!

As thou sittest in the moonlight there,
Its glory flooding thy golden hair,
And the only darkness that which lies
In the haunted chambers of thine eyes,
I feel my soul drawn unto thee,
Strangely, and strongly, and more and more,
As to one I have known and loved before;
For every soul is akin to me
That dwells in the land of mystery! 
I am the Lady Irmingard,
Born of a noble race and name! 
Many a wandering Suabian bard,
Whose life was dreary, and bleak, and hard,
Has found through me the way to fame. 
Brief and bright were those days, and the night
Which followed was full of a lurid light. 
Love, that of every woman’s heart
Will have the whole, and not a part,
That is to her, in Nature’s plan,
More than ambition is to man,
Her light, her life, her very breath,
With no alternative but death,
Found me a maiden soft and young,
Just from the convent’s cloistered school,
And seated on my lowly stool,
Attentive while the minstrels sung.