f stone,
And Douglas for our sovereign's gore
Shall yield us back his own."

I hear their ever-rising tread
Sound through the granite glen;
There is a tall pine overhead
Held by the mountain men.

That dizzy bridge which no horse could track
Has checked the outlaw's way;
There like a wild beast turns he back,
And grimly stands at bay.

Why smiles he so, when far below
He spies the toiling chase?
The pond'rous tree swings heavily,
And totters from its place.

They raise their eyes, for the sunny skies
Are lost in sudden shade:
But Douglas neither shrinks nor flies,
He need not fear the dead.

[Footnote A: See pp. 207, 208.]

[Footnote B: I have removed the title from the preceding fragment to the
ballad to which it obviously belongs.]

That is sufficiently unlike the Emily Bronte whom Charlotte edited. And
there is one other poem that stands alone among her poems with a strange
exotic beauty, a music, a rhythm and a magic utterly unlike any of the
forms we recognize as hers:

Gods of the old mythology
Arise in gloom and storm;
Adramalec, bow down thy head,
Reveal, dark fiend, thy form.
The giant sons of Anakim
Bowed lowest at thy shrine,
And thy temple rose in Argola,
With its hallowed groves of vine;
And there was eastern incense burnt,
And there were garments spread,
With the fine gold decked and broidered,
And tinged with radiant red,
With the radiant red of furnace flames
That through the shadows shone
As the full moon when on Sinai's top
Her rising light is thrown.

It is undated and unsigned, and so unlike Emily Bronte that I should not
be surprised if somebody were to rise up and prove that it is Coleridge
or somebody. Heaven forbid that this blow should fall on Mr. Clement
Shorter, and Sir William Robertson Nicoll, and on me. There is at least
one reassuring line. "Reveal, dark fiend, thy form", has a decided ring
of the Brontesque.

And here again, on many an otherwise negligible poem she has set her
seal, she has scattered her fine things; thus:

No; though the soil be wet with tears,
How fair so'er it grew,
The vital sap once perished
Will never flow again;
_And surer than that dwelling dread,
The narrow dungeon of the dead,
Time parts the hearts of men._

And again, she gives a vivid picture of war in four lines:

In plundered churches piled with dead