man has been seen once only, and that in the only woman
in whom there has been seen the paradox of passion without sensuousness.
Emily Bronte lived with an unparalleled energy a life of outward quiet,
in a loneliness which she shared only with the moors and with the
animals whom she loved. She required no passion-experience to endow her
with more than a memory of passion. Passion was alive in her as flame is
alive in the earth. And the vehemence of that inner fire fed on itself,
and wore out her body before its time, because it had no respite and no
outlet. We see her condemned to self-imprisonment, and dying of too much
life.

Her poems are few and brief, and nothing more personal has ever been
written. A few are as masterly in execution as in conception, and almost
all have a direct truth of utterance, which rarely lacks at least the
bare beauty of muscle and sinew, of a kind of naked strength and
alertness. They are without heat or daylight, the sun is rarely in them,
and then 'blood-red'; light comes as starshine, or comes as

hostile light
That does not warm but burn.

At times the landscape in this bare, grey, craggy verse, always a
landscape of Yorkshire moors, with its touches of stern and tender
memory, 'The mute bird sitting on the stone,' 'A little and a lone green
lane,' has a quality more thrilling than that of Wordsworth. There is
none of his observation, and none of his sense of a benignant 'presence
far more deeply interfused'; but there is the voice of the heart's
roots, crying out to its home in the earth.

At first this unornamented verse may seem forbidding, may seem even to
be ordinary, as an actual moorland may, to those for whom it has no
special attraction. But in the verse, as on the moors, there is space,
wind, and the smell of the earth; and there is room to be alone, that
liberty which this woman cried for when she cried:

Leave the heart that now I bear,
And give me liberty.

To be alone was for her to be alone with 'a chainless soul,' which asked
of whatever powers might be only 'courage to endure,' constancy not to
forget, and the right to leave the door wide open to those visions that
came to her out of mere fixed contemplation: 'the God of Visions,' as
she called her imagination, 'my slave, my comrade, and my king.' And we
know that her courage was flawless, heroic, beyond praise; that she
forgot nothing, not even that love for her unspeaka