Charlotte's web: A Middlesex University resource spinning Charlotte Mew's life with her words

The Poems of Emily Bronte introduced by Charlotte Mew and Charlotte Bronte

The Poems of Emily Bronte

introduced by Charlotte Mew - (1904)

To those who, holding dear, have formed for themselves any conception of that great genius who died "between the finishing of labour and the award of praise" the works of Emily Bronte must be chiefly interesting as the record of a unique and in some senses, an appalling personality: and it is undeniable that to the majority of those readers to whom she is but casually known, this personality - one of the most remarkable in the history of modern literature - presents itself as repugnant and distasteful.

"Mind", says Mr Pater, "we cannot choose but approve when we recognize it: soul may repel us and not because we misunderstand it." But it is possible that here is a soul which has most repelled where least it has been understood.

It is mainly upon Wuthering Heights that Emily Bronte's reputation as a great artist and a repulsive woman has been built : her poems - which in part supply its key and commentary - are a truer revelation of her veritable self than that grim and matchless tragedy, by which she is too exclusively known and upon which, perforce, her fame must rest. The note of violence which in a measure disfigures, and yet in a measure enhances and always triumphantly fails to weaken, the passion of Wuthering Heights is absent from the author's poems - as it would probably have been absent from her later work. In that dreadful and incomparable story she was testing her powers, she had not altogether gauged them. They were, at the outset, perhaps too much for her, and overwhelmed a mind, which young in waking could not confine and comprehend itself. Swept forward by the oncoming and strong current of her genius, she was, in the first rush of it, somewhat borne away; so strongly that we too are borne along with it, forgiving the impetuosity and turbid tumult of that stream.

Charlotte has urged, in vindication of a violence she might not dismiss and could not altogether explain, that "the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master". But that ultimately Emily must have been master of any gift she did possess, it is hardly possible to doubt. The evidence of her poems goes far to show that, in time, she would have discarded the unchecked vehemence of immaturity for a vigour more intrinsic and appealing. Her last lines - the dignity and grandeur of which it is hardly possible to overestimate - remind us that she was outgrowing her mighty childhood - that within sight of eternity the fruit of time was ripening fast.

It seems little matter for regret that no reliable likeness of Emily exists, that our mental presentment is not marred by any inefficient, dubious print, that we are bound to construct one for ourselves solely from the masterly notes with which Charlotte has furnished us in the prefaces to Wuthering Heights and the Posthumous Poems and from the suggestive study for which Miss Robinson is responsible.

But the true - the one original likeness, Emily herself has sketched: it is outlined in these slim pages of neglected verse. The eyes that watched unweariedly to find "how very far the morning lies away"; the "chainless soul", the "quenchless will", the "savage heart", and the "resentful mood" are mirrored here.

Throughout her work, to those who look for them, sweeter and lighter fancies peer like stars between the masses of dark cloud from clearer rifts of sky. True, that these far-hung lights are few, but here the vault from which they gleam is loftier, and shows behind its hovering grey a promise of serener blue. It is then to these few, many of them halting and imperfect verses, that we must turn if we are to judge rightly of the writer. They are illuminative footnotes to the fragmentary history of that tragic, heroic and majestic soul, which walked unswervingly with Truth, viewed failure with sublime serenity, and tried conclusions with the mightiest powers that beset mankind.

Emily was essentially a poet, and it is by poets that she has been severally recognized, interpreted and portrayed. "The pure note of absolutely right expression for things inexpressible in full by prose," says Swinburne, "Emily had for birthright", and Matthew Arnold wrote her elegy "who sank baffled, unknown-self-consumed".

Wuthering Heights, which is pre-eminently the achievement of a poet, has been not unfitly termed the "nightmare of a recluse", and these poems may well be called day-dreams-wonderful, awful dreams indeed-in their simple but compelling passion, their self-reliance and restraint, their concentrated force and purity. In form and structure they are curiously deficient, lacking for the most part the instinctive grandeur and simplicity of style which marks the prose of Wuthering Heights; and it is evident that Emily had never set herself to master the art which would have clothed them fittingly, matching with certainty of rhythm their majesty of thought. They were written secretly - without thought of publication, not destined by their author to challenge or invite critical consideration. These strange self-communings took shape in intervals of leisure, snatched from prosaic but determined work. Perhaps in the northern twilight of the Haworth kitchen with 'Tabby' knitting by the dying fire. Perhaps in greyer, lonelier dawns, when Emily rose early to the self - appointed labours of the day. For it is notable that this woman, who owned above most women the "inestimable gift of genius", was one who laid upon herself the simplest duties; that in that poor and Spartan [358] country parsonage it was Emily who, when need came, rose in the bitter winter mornings to do the disabled servant's work, who conned her German across the pastry board, and cooked and cleaned "as if", says her biographer,

"she had no other aim in view than the providing for the day's comfort. Of Emily's deeper self, her violent genius, neither friend nor neighbour dreamed in those days. And today it is only this Emily who is remembered."

This is not, however, the place to dwell upon the homelier and lovelier side of that extraordinary character; it has been set forth elsewhere by competent and reverent hands. It is with the darker and deeper aspect of it that we have to do in dealing with these poems, with the spiritual and mysterious self, which they so prominently illumine. Over this figure - hardly human in its self-sufficiency and aloofness, and yet more than human in its compassionate gentleness for the doomed and erring - they cast an unmistakable - almost unearthly light: showing a soul which scorns the world with masterful persistence and disclaims all comradeship save that of the "strange visitants of air", to itself so magically allied. For from the world and her fellows, Emily Bronte was perhaps one of nature's outcasts - a self-determined outlaw, whose indomitable spirit "even despair", the possible outcome of her instinctive isolation, was "powerless to destroy".

The earth - her passionate and only love - was peopled for her by spirits of storm and cloud, of sun and darkness. These were the sole companions of those boding or ministering spirits within her soul. Fancy - that "fairy love" - was her chosen playfellow and perhaps the only child she ever knew. Seldom, if ever, seeking intercourse with those around her, and impervious to the influence of other minds, she was mainly dependent on the material her own imagination could supply. Throughout these ideal and impersonal lyrics the individual note is everywhere discernible. They are melodies, rather than harmonies, many of a haunting and piercing sweetness, instinct with a sweeping and mournful music peculiarly her own.

Everywhere too, the note of pure passion is predominant, a passion untouched by mortality and unappropriated by sex - the passion of angels, of spirits, redeemed or fallen - if such there be. Rarely does any tranquil or tender human trait soften the brilliance of these strange imaginative pictures or relieve their gloom. Through the mist and sorrow of an ever-unsatisfied desire, she looked out upon the world, which the sad circumstances of her environment, together with the gloomy bias of her nature, showed so dark, with a curious indifference and mistrust. "An interpreter", says Charlotte, "should always have stood between her and the world"; but human intervention she would never have endured. It was rather a divine interpreter, which all through life her [359] ardent spirit beat its wings to reach and strained its eyes to see. For the "spirit-seer" who should make intelligible the awful chaos of existence and lighten its remorseless darkness, she had "watched and sought" her "life-time long".

In the dialogue entitled The Philosopher she utters the conclusive confession of her useless search:

Had I but seen his glorious eye
Once light the clouds that wilder me;
I ne'er had raised this coward cry
To cease to think, and cease to be;
I ne'er had called oblivion blest,
Nor stretching eager hands to death,
Implored to change for senseless rest
This sentient soul, this living breath -
Oh, let me die-that power and will
Their cruel strife may close;
And conquered good and conquering ill
Be lost in one repose.

This remarkable if somewhat incoherent poem is perhaps the most original, as it is certainly the finest in thought and conception of all her poems. It asks and answers most distinctly the dominant question, and reveals the intellectual tragedy of her life.

The thought of the pre-eminence of evil, of "conquered good and conquering ill" with which it closes, is the text and motive of Wuthering Heights. And "lost in one repose" she leaves the chief actors in that awful tale, awful - not so much in the consideration of the frenzied passions which it delineates, as in the general scheme which shows evil proceeding out of good as though it were indeed a natural outcome.

There, as in these verses, death is recognized as the one benignant power; the friend whose sad but unreproachable eyes greet alike kindly, good, and evil-comers-upon whose broad and pulseless breast the day of weeping ends. Edgar, the gentle, faithful husband, sleeps no more peacefully than the two wild lovers by his side. There can be -it is her final word- "no unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth."

Death solves and absolves all - it is rest; and the resolution of discordance: there is no sense of the mystery beyond, of judgement to follow; it holds only - to quote a passage from that work whose horrors have been so faithfully remembered while its beauties are frequently passed by -

"a repose that neither earth nor hell can break - an assurance of the endless and shadowless hereafter - where life is boundless in its duration, and love in its sympathy, and joy in its fulness."

It brought no terror to this girl, who mused habitually upon facts [360] and mysteries more terrible. It was no problem, because it was the end of problems; it scarcely meant obscurity to the soul thrust back relentlessly upon itself for light.

The Prisoner, a very unequal fragment, ambitious in conception, but weak and disjointed in execution, closes with an utterance as passionate and individual as that with which 'The Philosopher' ends.

Then dawns the Invisible; the unseen its truth reveals;
My outward sense is gone, my inward essence feels:
Oh! dreadful is the check - intense the agony -
When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see;
When the pulse begins to throb, the brain to think again;
The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain.

[ "What irks me most is this shattered prison," says Cathy, dying, but the speech is Emily's - "I'm tired of being enclosed here; I'm wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there; not seeing it through tears, the yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart." ]

Yet I would lose no sting, would wish no torture less;
The more that anguish racks, the earlier it will bless;
And robed in fires of hell, or bright with heavenly shine,
If it but herald death, the vision is divine!

The titles of these two poems are transparent pseudonyms for the author, and perhaps the sense of captivity underlies the utterances of The Philosopher most definitely, while the philosophic spirit, which was notably Emily's own, finds its expression in the latter poem. Of the hymns or invocations to imagination variously styled To Imagination - Plead for Me - My Comforter, and How Clear She Shines, the last named concludes with some burning and vigorous lines, summing up Emily's estimate of life with bitter intensity.

The spectacle here presented is one of trackless starless darkness, where images of perverted truth, wisdom and virtue seem to sweep like malignant meteors across a sullen and unlifting sky. This distorted picture may well appal the reader when he remembers that to the lonely brooding girl it was an actual and familiar scene. Vividly, insistently, as these dread visions are set before us, it is difficult to realize what existence was for her to whom they were the substance from which her thought took shape. Turning in recoil from such a conception of reality, two other worlds absorbed her gaze - the very intensity of which obscured her vision; worlds both bounded by her own "space-sweeping soul".

From another noticeable address to imagination - headed My Comforter, this declaration looms out lurid and convincing:

So stood I, in Heaven's glorious sun,
And in the glare of Hell;
My spirit drank a mingled tone,
Of seraph's song, and demon's moan,
What my soul bore, my soul alone
Within itself can tell!

And of that "mingled tone", the note of hell rang ominously clear. Such conflicting voices were always audible; she was always listening to something akin to the great Tannhauser overture, while the mighty deities of Death and Time stood by. Watching and listening thus, her spirit undismayed maintained its steadfast struggling independence; and with the vision of the unseen ever before her, sorrow and guilt took shape - came into nearer view - "passed by and plucked the golden blossom" of earthly hope and earthly promise. "I waited bliss", she cries, "and cherished rest."

The world counted for nothing; all it could offer she passed passionately yet coldly by. Riches and fame and love - such undesired futilities were things for which she watched weak mortals strive with distant pitying disdain. Hardly born for earth, she seemed to peer beyond it - craving a clearer vision than it yielded - crying for liberty as only captives cry - appealing strenuously "from tyranny to God".

Suffering and slavery were the great facts and despots of existence; and of suffering she had known enough, but hers was a nature which it could neither chasten nor subdue - it might but stir to rebellion one to whom submission was unknown. The only slavery known to her was a slavery to her own tameless and inexorable spirit; no alien power could have proved so obdurate and pitiless as was this being to itself.

Body and soul were fitly mated. The hand which applied the searing remedy to its own wounded flesh, and the hand which wrote these lines were truly one:

No promised heaven, these wild desires
Could all, or half fulfil;
No threatened hell, with quenchless fires,
Subdue this quenchless will!

It was with the face of a pagan warrior that she confronted life and met death. A pagan above all she was: the centuries of revelation behind her seem not to have won a glance of question or of recognition; Christianity, taking its place with "the thousand creeds that move men's hearts", must have been found with them "unutterably vain", nor does she even momentarily seem to turn from the sin and suffering of humanity to the picture of a suffering but sinless God. Indeed the religion of meditation and sacrament and self-surrender could never have won a possible assent from one who shunned so resolutely the common pledges and submissions of daily life. Only in [362] her infinite forbearance with, and compassion for the victims of weakness and vanity and passion, does she touch that eternally uplifted figure which hangs between earth and heaven to link inseparably the human with the divine. We cannot but remember that it was not Charlotte, but the pagan Emily, who to the last protected and forgave the sorry wreck who, once the pride, had come to be the terror of their home. It was she who achieved his epitaph wherein we read, almost amazed, the plea for weakness penned by one who so accounted strength:

Then "Bless the friendly dust," I said,
"That hides thy unlamented head."
Vain as thou wert and weak as vain,
The slave of Falsehood, Pride and Pain-
My heart has nought akin to thine;
Thy soul is powerless over mine-
But these were thoughts that vanished too;
Unwise, unholy and untrue.

Revulsion ends in prayer and pity, and "Kind Heaven" is to "grant that spirit rest".

Throughout these poems there is not one plea for joy, as there is hardly a hint that life can hold it; the sole prayer is for endurance, the sole hope lies in the mind from which it springs. Forced back upon the witness of her own soul for God, she lived and died a solitary, dauntless, sightless spirit, turning toward the day and sending forth the voice and vision of the night.

Permitted no revelation, offered no certainty, but desiring both, the mind is called upon to sanction the worship of which it is itself the deity:

And am I wrong to worship where
Faith cannot doubt, nor hope despair,
Since my own soul can grant my prayer?
Speak, God of visions, plead for me,
And tell why I have chosen Thee!

There was for her no other choice-no alternative vision, and yet the impotence of her own mighty, but not almighty, spirit to dissipate the darkness of the disordered universe, to mitigate its pain, was ever present to her consciousness, and impotence to such a mind was a lash from which nothing could take the sting.

In Self-Interrogation she thus reviews the past - questions the future:

The vanished day? It leaves a sense
Of labour hardly done;
Of little gained with vast expense -
A sense of grief alone!
Well, thou hast fought for many a year,
Hast fought thy whole life through,
Hast humbled Falsehood, trampled Fear;
What is there left to do?

The third and fourth verses of the same poem exhibit the writer's power of vivid personification:

Time stands before the door of Death,
Upbraiding bitterly;
And Conscience, with exhaustless breath,
Pours black reproach on me:
And though I've said that Conscience lies
And Time should Fate condemn;
Still, sad Repentance clouds my eyes,
And makes me yield to them!

The massive figures of Time and Death - two familiar deities - stand visibly before us, and we are confronted by a picture that Watts might well have painted: abstractions take shape and force themselves upon our vision almost before they can arrest our thought.

In the fine imagery of Death, this quality again is manifest. Emily had the power of presenting images and impressions of a convincing reality with a neglect or disdain of detail, which displays the pure imaginative quality of her work. Scenes and moods and thoughts are flashed upon our consciousness, we know not how; their terror, or delicacy, or beauty, is surely indicated, yet never obviously drawn - she calls up spirits with a spirit's hand.

It is said that her genius was masculine, but surely it was purely spiritual, strangely and exquisitely severed from embodiment and freed from any accident of sex. Never perhaps has passion been portrayed as she portrayed it - wayward and wild as storm, but pure as fire, as incorruptible as life's own essence - deathless in the face of death. And nature is presented to us by the same unerring hand. Sublime, fantastic, are the scenes she puts before us, magically true - unmarred by any alien element - living as nature lives, set in no human frame.

The sense of colour too is here and there importunate.

In Stars we pause arrested by the lines: "Blood-red he rose, and, arrow-straight/His fierce beams struck my brow." Strongly the splendour reaches us-seems unsurpassable, but turning to the page again it spreads and deepens with-

My lids closed down, yet through their veil
I saw him blazing still,
And steep in gold the misty dale,
And flash upon the hill.

The colour symbolism in The Philosopher is one of subtle beauty and significance. The Day-dream leads us through a maze of colour - half-earthly, half-celestial, and wholly brilliant as the tints which dart across the vividly remembered phases of a sensitive waking dream.

The following verse of the Death-scene brings-and now, with scarcely one aid to actual sight - the shifting hues of luminous twilight into view:

Paled, at length, the sweet sun setting
Sunk to peace the twilight breeze:
Summer dews fell softly, wetting
Glen, and glade, and silent trees.

The music here perhaps calls up the vision, and merged, they form one of the loveliest pictures Emily has drawn, and the last three verses are among the most poignant and appealing she ever wrote.

Then his eyes began to weary,
Weighed beneath a mortal sleep;
And their orbs grew strangely dreary,
Clouded, even as they would weep.

But they wept not, but they changed not,
Never moved and never closed;
Troubled still, and still they ranged not,
Wandered not, nor yet reposed!

So I knew that he was dying,
Stooped, and raised his languid head;
Felt no breath and heard no sighing,
So I knew that he was dead.

Throughout the poems colour and thought and music move, mournfully blent, haunting the mind and leaving it at last unable to determine whether most poignantly it heard, or felt, or saw.

When first we listen to these songs, we are brought face to face with the woman who wrote them - we must remember who the singer is. When once we know them and have been haunted by their rebellious and contending music it will not be possible to forget. It will then be difficult to appraise them dispassionately, to single out here a lyric for appreciation, or there to critically discard some halting and imperfect piece. They will stand for the most part as a whole - the consistent, successive utterance of a soul whose claim to our admiration or regard we must emphatically accept or deny.

In a book of selections, such lyrics as Death - The Visionary - Hope, and the exquisite Remembrance would properly find their place, but to meet them isolated thus for the first time would be to miss their real significance. To come upon such a poem as Remembrance, without the knowledge that its author knew absolutely [365] nothing of the passion which breathes and burns in every line, would be to lose the apprehension of the artistic power of a writer who touched the unknown with such an unfaltering hand. Here Emily sounds, for the first and last time, the depths of human anguish; painting, with a profound and poignant power, the picture of surviving life stationed stern and unswaying before the spectacle of murdered joy.

The two most prominent women poets of the century, Mrs Browning and Christina Rossetti, among whose writings passion, exotic or mystical, plays so conspicuous a part, have never surpassed, if they have ever equalled, this love-song of a woman who never loved. It is Emily's only recognition of that feeling which, for most women, colours and transfigures and embraces life. We feel that she alone could have thus presented it, while yet remembering how elsewhere with her own severe and serious certainty she wrote such lines as these:

Mirth is but a mad beguiling
Of the golden-gifted time:
Love-a demon-meteor, wiling
Heedless feet to gulfs of crime

It is interesting to contrast the restrained but burning constancy of the feeling which Remembrance portrays, with that of the hero of Wuthering Heights. It has all the tenacity - the desperate vigour of his passion without its feverish ferocity, and suggests that Emily could, when she chose, exchange the awful for the sublime. Full of a grand and sweeping music, true to the deepest and gravest passion, it ranks among the two or three of her poems which are indubitably great.

The Death Scene - despite the weakness of the opening verses - a picture of moving and pathetic beauty, is the poem which least reflects the personality of the writer. The mute protest of the dying lover, which serves to check the distracting remonstrance of the living, is a fine dramatic touch; and the last four verses invite comparison with those on a similar theme by another now unnoticed poet. Hood's 'Death-Bed' is perfect in construction and very different in conception, but in both these poems truth and pathos meet. The quietude of resignation and the more awful stillness of despair are each convincingly portrayed, but Emily's scene of human ending - in spite of its technical defects - is the one of surpassing loveliness and power.

The song beginning "The linnet in the rocky dells" - a musical and lovely dirge - contains one characteristic verse:

Well, let them fight for honour's breath
Or pleasure's shade pursue-
The dweller in the land of death
Is changed and careless too

Changed to all "fleeting treacheries", careless of all the poor pursuits of earth, in that "land where all things are forgotten", to Emily must any liberated spirit be. Nature alone might be remembered - its voice regarded - its whispering solace heard. Nature, the one subduing and consolatory power, she worshipped with all the intense and concentrated passion of her soul. It was a guardian - a lover, from which if she were wrested she must die. The "dim moon struggling in the sky" kept welcome watch with her; the stars departing left a "desert sky". With them she says:

I was at peace, and drank your beams
As they were life to me;
And revelled in my changeful dreams,
Like petrel on the sea.

Thought followed thought, star followed star,
Through boundless regions, on;
While one sweet influence, near and far,
Thrilled through and proved us one!

Human sympathy she never sought, and love she "laughed to scorn", but the "nightly stars", the "silent dew", the sun that "gilds the morning" - these were the "best beloved of years", the guardians against an ever-threatening despair. Nature under all aspects greeted her always with a face of tireless beauty, a breast of wide-sufficing rest. The motherhood of earth for her children - the love of death for its own, such communion she could taste and understand. One held the liberty for which she panted, and one the rest towards which she leaned; and both surveyed, unmoved as she, the trivial prizes for which men strive and die.

In lines which recall one of Byron's well-known stanzas, she mourns in exile the "fields of home", as he the purity and freshness of a departed youth. The thought of the stunted heather on her beloved moors evokes this outburst:

-not the loved music, whose waking
Makes the soul of the Swiss die away,
Has a spell more adored and heart-breaking
Than, for me, in that blighted heath lay.

The spirit which bent 'neath its power
How it longed-how it burned to be free!
If I could have wept in that hour Those tears had been heaven to me.

The first six of the posthumous poems, from one of which these verses are taken, are clumsy and youthful compositions, but through them the dominant adoration of her life finds some inadequate expression. They speak her strong and unappeasable yearning for the things which alone she loved and loved so well.

"My sister Emily", wrote Charlotte, "loved the moors. Flowers brighter than the rose bloomed in the blackest of the heath for her; out of a sullen hollow in a livid hillside her mind could make an Eden."

She had to admit one power before which her tameless spirit knelt in "Fond idolatry", and so she puts this plea into the voice of the spirit of wind and sun and sky:

Few hearts to mortals given,
On earth so wildly pine,
Yet few would ask a heaven
More like this earth than thine.

This later selection notably includes the famous Last Lines and the five stanzas beginning "Often rebuked, yet always back returning", the last two of which contain the essence of her personal philosophy.

I'll walk where my own nature would be leading:
It vexes me to choose another guide:
Where the grey flocks in ferny glens are feeding:
Where the wild wind blows on the mountain side.

What have those lonely mountains worth revealing?
More glory and more grief than I can tell:
The earth that wakes one human heart to feeling
Can centre both the worlds of Heaven and Hell.

Of her two greatest and best-known poems-the Old Stoic and Last Lines, it is hardly necessary to speak. They are familiar to all students of English literature, and the latter stands alone and unsurpassed for depth and gravity, for passionate and lofty strength.

"No last words", says Swinburne, "of poet or hero, or sage or saint, were ever worthy of longer and more reverent remembrance than that appeal which is so far above and beyond a prayer to the indestructible God within herself."

On that alone might have rested her claim to fame.

But a more blessed fate than that of fame awaited her. Death snatched her early, kindly, from a life which must have been to the end, it seems, thwarted and overcast. And in the near light of its approach, she perceived it clearly no longer as a friend to welcome, but as a last enemy to overthrow. She met its challenge, and being born for conquest, overcame. There was "Not room for Death, Nor atom that his might could render void." "While physically she perished, mentally she grew stronger than we had yet known her", Charlotte affirmed, relating the details of he-r sister's ending, with a truth and beauty of expression which she has never reached elsewhere: "Day by day when I saw with what a front she met suffering I looked on her with an anguish of wonder and love. I have seen nothing like it; but indeed I have never seen her parallel in [368] anything. Stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood alone."

Her nature stood alone. That was the awful fact - the tragedy of her life. Alone in its negation of all that other mortals hold most dear; alone in its unwavering pity for frailty and error - no touch of which could ever mar the righteousness and vigour of this one woman's heart; alone in suffering and achievement; in the dark uncompanioned vigils of its life and the triumphant conflict of its death. It seems almost as if she must stand thus alone for ever - on that "other side of silence"; not framed for bliss, and yet too strong for an eternity of groping torment, alien alike to spirits lost and blest. Rather, resolved into the elements she worshipped, she seems to find her immortality, transmuted, given back to earth again. Her spirit - one with the keen and searching airs that sweep wildly and sweetly over the wastes she loved - finds rest, and liberty, and wandering peace.

Strong to act and think and feel in the narrow channels prescribed for her by dreary circumstance and a despotic temperament, she was yet beset by a weakness that comes of undiverted strength. Her resolute rejection of human interest and sympathy intensified her suffering and in a measure nullified her powers. She possessed a force of passion and vision not given to any of her countrywomen who have spoken widely to the world; and yet she speaks and can speak only to a few scattered hearers - to those to whom she is, in some strange and far-off fashion, personally dear.

For few will find it in their hearts to love this passionate child of storm and cloud: hers was a nature slow to attract; swift to dismay: but those who do, will love her with something of her own intensity, her own unfitful fire, and with that constancy which, it has been pointed out, is a quality with which nearly all her characters or personifications are endowed. "She died", it was said, "in a time of promise"; and if she had "only lived!" cried those who, noting the immaturities and deficiencies of her always inspired but imperfect work, imagined a glorious future for one who never let her "spirit tire with looking for what is to be".

But we, surveying that life "in all things troubled and taintless", foreseeing the certain sorrow, the possible failure of its future, reviewing the defeat and anguish of its past - find the cry stifled on our lips: and silence takes the place of speech as we remember that she lived long enough to lift such a cry for liberty as few women have ever lifted: to give a brief but sufficient utterance to the soul

whose calm intensity
Glared sunless on the passion sun that blinds
Unblinded--

and to die as she had lived boldly confronting, and at the last defying, [369] death - crying there was "not room" for it - making no way.

Wuthering Heights, said Sydney Dobell, who was the first to claim it for immortality, displayed the "unformed writing of a giant-hand, and the large utterance of a baby-god". Fragments of that large utterance - imperfect characters traced by that giant-hand are set before us in these lyrics. With the exception of a few weak and early pieces, there is hardly one which does not display some sombre and startling beauty - some burning thought or delicate ray of fancy - some fine image or reflection. Unique in their originality, sincerity and force, they have rested alone and almost unnoticed in the lumber room of literature: it is time the dust was shaken from them; that they stood forth to speak for themselves and their creator in unflinching tones.

They cannot attract the casual reader; they must assuredly dispense with popularity, and possibly with widespread recognition - but they will live in the mind of that finer company with whom "remembrance makes fame".

POEMS BY ELLIS BELL,

Faith and Despondency