The Three Brontes Part 13

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.

There is no doubt about those three verses; that they are the expression of the rarest and the most tremendous experience that is given to humanity to know.

If "The Visionary" does not touch that supernal place, it belongs indubitably to the borderland:

Silent is the house; all are laid asleep: One alone looks out o'er the snow-wreaths deep, Watching every cloud, dreading every breeze That whirls the wildering drift and bends the groaning trees.

Cheerful is the hearth, soft the matted floor; Not one shivering gust creeps through pane or door; The little lamp burns straight, the rays shoot strong and far I trim it well to be the wanderer's guiding-star.

Frown, my haughty sire! chide, my angry dame!

Set your slaves to spy; threaten me with shame; But neither sire nor dame, nor prying serf shall know, What angel nightly tracks that waste of frozen snow.

What I love shall come like visitant of air, Safe in secret power from lurking human snare; What loves me no word of mine shall e'er betray, Though for faith unstained my life must forfeit pay.

Burn then, little lamp; glimmer straight and clear-- Hush! a rustling wing stirs, methinks, the air; He for whom I wait, thus ever comes to me: Strange Power! I trust thy might; trust thou my constancy.

Those who can see nothing in this poem but the idealization of an earthly pa.s.sion must be strangely and perversely mistaken in their Emily Bronte. I confess I can never read it without thinking of one of the most marvellous of all poems of Divine Love: "En una Noche Escura".

EN UNA NOCHE ESCURA[A]

Upon an obscure night Fevered with Love's anxiety (O hapless, happy plight!) I went, none seeing me, Forth from my house, where all things quiet be.

Blest night of wandering In secret, when by none might I be spied, Nor I see anything; Without a light to guide Save that which in my heart burnt in my side.

That light did lead me on More surely than the shining of noontide, Where well I knew that One Did for my coming bide; Where he abode might none but he abide.

O night that didst lead thus; O night more lovely than the dawn of light; O night that broughtest us Lover to lover's sight, Lover to loved, in marriage of delight!

[Footnote A: "St. John of the Cross: The Dark Night of the Soul."

Translated by Arthur Symons in vol. ii. of his _Collected Poems_.]

We know what love is celebrated there, and we do not know so clearly what manner of supernal pa.s.sion is symbolized in Emily Bronte's angel-lover. There is a long way there between Emily Bronte and St.

John of the Cross, between her lamp-lit window and his "Dark Night of the Soul", and yet her opening lines have something of the premonitory thrill, the haunting power of tremendous suggestion, the intense, mysterious expectancy of his. The spiritual experience is somewhat different, but it belongs to the same realm of the super-physical; and it is very far from Paganism.

She wrote of these supreme ardours and mysteries; and she wrote that most inspired and vehement song of pa.s.sionate human love, "Remembrance":

Cold in the earth--and the deep snow piled above thee, Far, far removed, cold in the dreary grave!

Have I forgot, my only Love, to love thee....

But "Remembrance" is too well known for quotation here. So is "The Old Stoic".

These are perfect and unforgettable things. But there is hardly one of the least admirable of her poems that has not in it some unforgettable and perfect verse or line:

And oh, how slow that keen-eyed star Has tracked the chilly grey!

What, watching yet? how very far The morning lies away.

That is how some watcher on Wuthering Heights might measure the long pa.s.sage of the night.

"The Lady to her Guitar", that recalls the dead and forgotten player, sings:

It is as if the gla.s.sy brook Should image still its willows fair, _Though years ago the woodman's stroke Laid low in dust their Dryad-hair_.

She has her "dim moon struggling in the sky", to match Charlotte's "the moon reigns glorious, glad of the gale, glad as if she gave herself to his fierce caress with love". At sixteen, in the schoolroom,[A] she wrote verses of an incomparable simplicity and poignancy:

A little while, a little while, The weary task is put away, And I can sing and I can smile, Alike, while I have holiday.

Where wilt thou go, my hara.s.sed heart-- What thought, what scene invites thee now?

What spot, or near or far apart, Has rest for thee, my weary brow?

The house is old, the trees are bare, Moonless above bends twilight's dome; But what on earth is half so dear-- So longed for--as the hearth of home?

The mute bird sitting on the stone, The dank moss dripping from the wall, The thorn-trees gaunt, the walks o'ergrown, I love them--how I love them all!

Still, as I mused, the naked room, The alien firelight died away, And, from the midst of cheerless gloom, I pa.s.sed to bright, unclouded day.

A little and a lone green lane That opened on a common wide; A distant, dreamy, dim blue chain Of mountains circling every side.

A heaven so clear, an earth so calm.

So sweet, so soft, so hushed an air; And, deepening still the dream-like charm, Wild moor-sheep feeding everywhere.

[Footnote A: Madame Duclaux a.s.signs to these verses a much later date--the year of Emily Bronte's exile in Brussels. Sir William Robertson Nicoll also considers that "the 'alien firelight' suits Brussels better than the Yorkshire hearth of 'good, kind' Miss Wooler".

To me the schoolroom of the Pensionnat suggests an "alien" stove, and not the light of any fire at all.]

There was no nostalgia that she did not know. And there was no funeral note she did not sound; from the hopeless gloom of

In the earth--the earth--thou shalt be laid, A grey stone standing over thee; Black mould beneath thee spread, And black mould to cover thee.

Well--there is rest there, So fast come thy prophecy; The time when my sunny hair Shall with gra.s.s-roots entwined be.

But cold--cold is that resting-place Shut out from joy and liberty, And all who loved thy living face Will shrink from it shudderingly.

From that to the melancholy grace of the moorland dirge:

The linnet in the rocky dells, The moor-lark in the air, The bee among the heather-bells That hide my lady fair:

The wild deer browse above her breast; The wild birds raise their brood; And they, her smiles of love caressed, Have left her solitude.

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.