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

  In plundered churches piled with dead
    The heavy charger neighed for food,
  The wounded soldier laid his head
    ’Neath roofless chambers splashed with blood.

Again, she has a vision: 

  In all the hours of gloom
    My soul was rapt away. 
  I stood by a marble tomb
    Where royal corpses lay.

A frightful thing appears to her, “a shadowy thing, most dim”: 

And still it bent above, Its features still in view; It seemed close by; and yet more far Than this world from the farthest star That tracks the boundless blue.

  Indeed ’twas not the space
  Of earth or time between,
  But the sea of deep eternity,
  The gulf o’er which mortality
  Has never, never been.

The date is June 1837, a year earlier than the ballad.  And here is the first sketch or germ of “The Old Stoic”: 

  Give we the hills our equal prayer,
    Earth’s breezy hills and heaven’s blue sea,
  I ask for nothing further here
    Than my own heart and liberty.

And here is another poem, of a sterner and a sadder stoicism: 

  There was a time when my cheek burned
    To give such scornful words the lie,
  Ungoverned nature madly spurned
    The law that bade it not defy. 
  Oh, in the days of ardent youth
  I would have given my life for truth.

  For truth, for right, for liberty,
    I would have gladly, freely died;
  And now I calmly bear and see
    The vain man smile, the fool deride,
  Though not because my heart is tame,
  Though not for fear, though not for shame.

  My soul still chokes at every tone
    Of selfish and self-clouded error;
  My breast still braves the world alone,
    Steeled as it ever was to terror. 
  Only I know, howe’er I frown,
  The same world will go rolling on.

October 1839.  It is the worldly wisdom of twenty-one!

* * * * *

If this, the ballad and the rest, were all, the world would still be richer, by a wholly new conception of Emily Bronte, of her resources and her range.

But it is by no means all.  And here we come to the opportunity which, owing to that temporary decline of fervour, Mr. Shorter has so unfortunately missed.

He might have picked out of the mass wherein they lie scattered, all but lost, sometimes barely recognizable, the fragments of a Titanic epic.  He might have done something to build up again the fabric of that marvellous romance, that continuous dream, that stupendous and gorgeous fantasy in which Emily Bronte, for at least eleven years, lived and moved and had her being.