To waken doubt in one
  Holding so fast by thine infinity;
    So surely anchored on
  The steadfast 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 wert 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.

It is not a perfect work.  I do not think it is by any means the finest poem that Emily Bronte ever wrote.  It has least of her matchless, incommunicable quality.  There is one verse, the fifth, that recalls almost painfully the frigid poets of Deism of the eighteenth century.  But even that association cannot destroy or contaminate its superb sincerity and dignity.  If it recalls the poets of Deism, it recalls no less one of the most ancient of all metaphysical poems, the poem of Parmenides on Being: 

[Greek:  pos d’ an epeit apoloito pelon, pos d’ an ke genoito;
ei ge genoit, ouk est’, oud ei pote mellei esesthai.

* * * * *

tos, genesis men apesbestai kai apiotos olethros.
oude diaireton estin, epei pan estin homoion
oude ti pae keneon....

                                              ....eon gar eonti pelazei.]

Parmenides had not, I imagine, “penetrated” to Haworth; yet the last verse of Emily Bronte’s poem might have come straight out of his [Greek:  ta pros halaetheiaen].  Truly, an astonishing poem to have come from a girl in a country parsonage in the ’forties.

But the most astonishing thing about it is its inversion of a yet more consecrated form:  “Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee”.  Emily Bronte does not follow St. Augustine.  She has an absolutely inspired and independent insight: 

    Life—­that in me has rest,
  As I—­undying Life—­have power in Thee!

For there was but little humility or resignation about Emily Bronte.  Nothing could be prouder than her rejection of the view that must have been offered to her every Sunday from her father’s pulpit.  She could not accept the Christian idea of separation and the Mediator.  She knew too well the secret.  She saw too clearly the heavenly side of the eternal quest.  She heard, across the worlds, the downward and the upward rush of the Two immortally desirous; when her soul cried she heard the answering cry of the divine pursuer:  “My heart is restless till it rests in Thee.”  It is in keeping with her vision of the descent of the Invisible, who comes

  With that clear dusk of heaven that brings the thickest stars,