[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 passion 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 passionate 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 passage of the night.

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

  It is as if the glassy 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 harassed 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 passed to bright, unclouded day.