* * * * *

  Hark! through the pass with threatening crash
    Comes on the increasing roar! 
  But what shall brave the deep, deep wave,
    The deadly pass before?

  Their feet are dyed in a darker tide,
    Who dare those dangers drear. 
  Their breasts have burst through the battle’s worst,
    And why should they tremble here?

* * * * *

  “Now, my brave men, this one pass more,
    This narrow chasm of 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.