All the battle-pieces and songs of battle, the songs of mourning and captivity and exile, the songs of heroism, martyrdom, defiance, songs, or fragments of songs, of magic and divination, and many of the love songs, belong to this cycle.  What is more, many of the poems of eighteen-forty-six and of eighteen-fifty are Gondal poems.

For in the Gondal legend the idea of the Doomed Child, an idea that haunted Emily Bronte, recurs perpetually, and suggests that the Gondal legend is the proper place of “The Two Children”, and “The Wanderer from the Fold”, which appear in the posthumous Selections of eighteen-fifty.  It certainly includes three at the very least of the poems of eighteen-forty-six:  “The Outcast Mother”, “A Death-Scene”, and “Honour’s Martyr”.

It does not look, I own, as if this hunt for Gondal literature could interest a single human being; which is why nobody, so far as I know, has pursued it.  And the placing of those four poems in the obscure Gondal legend would have nothing but “a bibliographical interest” were it not that, when placed there, they show at once the main track of the legend.  And the main track of the legend brings you straight to the courses of Wuthering Heights and of the love poems.

The sources of Wuthering Heights have been the dream and the despair of the explorer, long before Mrs. Humphry Ward tried to find them in the Tales of Hoffmann.  And “Remembrance”, one of the most passionate love poems in the language, stood alone and apart from every other thing that Emily Bronte had written.  It was awful and mysterious in its loneliness.

But I believe that “Remembrance” also may be placed in the Gondal legend without any violence to its mystery.

For supreme in the Gondal legend is the idea of a mighty and disastrous passion, a woman’s passion for the defeated, the dishonoured, and the outlawed lover; a creature superb in evil, like Heathcliff, and like Heathcliff tragic and unspeakably mournful in his doom.  He or some hero like him is “Honour’s Martyr”.

  To-morrow, Scorn will blight my name,
    And Hate will trample me,
  Will load me with a coward’s shame—­
    A traitor’s perjury.

  False friends will launch their covert sneers
    True friends will wish me dead;
  And I shall cause the bitterest tears
    That you have ever shed.

Like Heathcliff, he is the “unblessed, unfriended child”; the child of the Outcast Mother, abandoned on the moor.

  Forests of heather, dark and long,
    Wave their brown branching arms above;
  And they must soothe thee with their song,
    And they must shield my child of love.

* * * * *

  Wakes up the storm more madly wild,
    The mountain drifts are tossed on high;
  Farewell, unblessed, unfriended child,
    I cannot bear to watch thee die.

In an unmistakable Gondal song Geraldine’s lover calls her to the tryst on the moor.  In the Gondal poem “Geraldine”, she has her child with her in a woodland cavern, and she prays over it wildly: