Explore "The Princess" by Alfred Tennyson on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
So was their sanctuary violated, / So their fair college turned to hospital; / At first with all confusion: by and by / Sweet order lived again with other laws: / A kindlier influence reigned; and everywhere / Low voices with the ministering hand / Hung round the sick: the maidens came, they talked, / They sang, they read: till she not fair began / To gather light, and she that was, became / Her former beauty treble; and to and fro / With books, with flowers, with Angel offices, / Like creatures native unto gracious act, / And in their own clear element, they moved.
But sadness on the soul of Ida fell, / And hatred of her weakness, blent with shame. / Old studies failed; seldom she spoke: but oft / Clomb to the roofs, and gazed alone for hours / On that disastrous leaguer, swarms of men / Darkening her female field: void was her use, / And she as one that climbs a peak to gaze / O'er land and main, and sees a great black cloud / Drag inward from the deeps, a wall of night, / Blot out the slope of sea from verge to shore, / And suck the blinding splendour from the sand, / And quenching lake by lake and tarn by tarn / Expunge the world: so fared she gazing there; / So blackened all her world in secret, blank / And waste it seemed and vain; till down she came, / And found fair peace once more among the sick.