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;
When the pulse begins to throb, the brain to think again;
The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain.'

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;
Worthless as withered weeds,

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,
And Thou were left alone,

Every existence would exist in Thee.

There is not room for Death,

Nor atom that his might could render void:
Thou-THOU art Being and Breath,

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;
Its unsustaining vastness waxes drear;
And visions rising, legion after legion,

Bring the unreal world too strangely near.

I'll walk, but not in old heroic traces,
And not in paths of high morality,

And not among the half-distinguished faces,
The clouded forms of long-past history.

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.

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
Thy noble heart for ever, ever more?

Cold in the earth-and fifteen wild Decembers,
Fron those brown hills, have melted into spring:
Faithful, indeed, is the spirit that remembers
After such years of change and suffering!

Sweet Love of youth, forgive, if I forget thee,
While the world's tide is bearing me along;
Other desires and other hopes beset me,
Hopes which obscure, but cannot do thee wrong!

No later light has lightened up my heaven,
No second morn has ever shone for me;

All my life's bliss from thy dear life was given,
All my life's bliss is in the grave with thee.

But, when the days of golden dreams had perished,
And even Despair was powerless to destroy;
Then did I learn how existence could be cherished,
Strengthened, and fed without the aid of joy.

Then did I check the tears of useless passion-
Weaned my young soul from yearning after thine;
Sternly denied its burning wish to hasten
Down to that tomb already more than mine.

And, even yet, I dare not let it languish,
Dare not indulge in memory's rapturous pain;
Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish,
How could I seek the empty world again?

THE OLD STOIC.

Riches I hold in light esteem,
And Love I laugh to scorn;
And lust of fame was but a dream,
That vanished with the morn:

And if I pray, the only prayer

That moves my lips for me

Is, 'Leave the heart that now I bear,
And give me liberty!'

Yes, as my swift days near their goal,

'Tis all that I implore;

In life and death, a chainless soul,
With courage to endure.