For rigorous teachers seized my youth,
And purged its faith, and trimm’d its fire,
Show’d me the high white star of Truth,
There bade me gaze, and there aspire;
Even now their whispers pierce the gloom:
What doest thou in this living tomb?

Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) English poet and critic

“Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse,” st. 12, Fraser’s Magazine (1855-04)
    (Source)

On his tour of a seventeenth-century monastery in Grenoble, in the French Alps, the headquarters of the Carthusian order of Catholic monks .