the table, seems to me to be no unfit ending for a life so impatient of constraint from others, so implacable in its slavery to its own principles. The poetry of Emily Brontë is small in extent and conventional in form. Its burning thoughts are concealed for the most part in the tame and ambling measures dedicated to female verse by the practice of Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon. That she was progressing to the last even in this matter of the form is shown by the little posthumous collection of her verses issued by Charlotte, consisting of early, and very weak pieces, and of two poems written in the last year of her life, which attain, for the first time, the majesty of rhythm demanded by such sublime emotions. But it is impossible not to regret that she missed that accomplishment in the art of poetry which gives an added force to the verse of her great French contemporary, Marceline Valmore, the only modern poetess who can fitly be compared with Emily Brontë for power of expressing passion in its simplicity. In the 1846 volume there are but few of the contributions of Ellis Bell in which the form is adequate to the thought. Even The Prisoner, certain lines of which have justly called forth Mr. Swinburne's admiration, is on the whole a disjointed and halting composition. The moving and tear-compelling elegy called A Death-Scene, in conception one of the most original and passionate poems in existence, is clothed in a measure that is like the livery of a charitable institution. This limitation of style does not interfere with the beauty of her three or four best poems, where indeed it does not exist, but it prevents the poetess in all but these superlative successes from attaining that harmony and directness of utterance which should characterise a song so unflinchingly sincere as hers. It is difficult to praise Emily's three or four greatest poems without an air of exaggeration. Finest among them all is that outburst of agnostic faith that was found by Charlotte on her desk when she died, a 'last poem' not to be surpassed in dignity and self-reliance by any in the language. The Old Stoic might have prepared us for the Last Lines by its concentrated force and passion. But the 'chainless soul' of the author found its most characteristic utterance in the Stanzas which stand second in our selection, the two last of which contain in its quintessence the peculiar gospel that it was the mission of Emily Brontë to preach It was a message that brought no peace or happiness to the fiery soul that bore it. For her, in her own wonderful words, 'intense the agony When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see; Under such a strain of being, no wonder that the pale and slender physical frame declined, and that our literature was deprived, at the age of twenty-nine, of an unrecognised, uncherished, undeveloped woman, 'whose soul Knew no fellow for might, Passion, vehemence, grief, Daring, since Byron died.' EDMUND W. GOSSE, LAST LINES. No coward soul is mine, No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere: I see Heaven's glories shine, And faith shines equal, arming me from fear. O God within my breast, Almighty, ever-present Deity! Life-that in me has rest, As I-undying Life-have power in thee! Vain are the thousand creeds That move men's hearts: unutterably vain; Or idlest froth amid the boundless main, To waken doubt in one Holding so fast by thine infinity; So surely anchored on The stedfast rock of immortality. With wide-embracing love Thy spirit animates eternal years, Pervades and broods above, Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates, and rears. Though earth and man were gone, And suns and universes ceased to be, Every existence would exist in Thee. There is not room for Death, Nor atom that his might could render void: And what THOU art may never be destroyed. STANZAS. Often rebuked, yet always back returning To those first feelings that were born with me, And leaving busy chase of wealth and learning For idle dreams of things which cannot be: To-day, I will seek not the shadowy region; Bring the unreal world too strangely near. I'll walk, but not in old heroic traces, And not among the half-distinguished faces, I'll walk where my own nature would be leading: Where the grey flocks in ferny glens are feeding; 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, Severed at last by Time's all-severing wave? Now, when alone, do my thoughts no longer hover Over the mountains, on that northern shore, Resting their wings where heath and fern-leaves cover Cold in the earth-and fifteen wild Decembers, Sweet Love of youth, forgive, if I forget thee, No later light has lightened up my heaven, All my life's bliss from thy dear life was given, But, when the days of golden dreams had perished, Then did I check the tears of useless passion- And, even yet, I dare not let it languish, THE OLD STOIC. Riches I hold in light esteem, And if I pray, the only prayer That moves my lips for me Is, 'Leave the heart that now I bear, Yes, as my swift days near their goal, 'Tis all that I implore; In life and death, a chainless soul, |