But he remembered enough of those early glories to realise that if he would regain happiness, he must “become, as it were, a little child again,” get free of “the burden and cumber of devised wants,” and recapture the value and the glory of the common things of life.

He was so resolutely bent on this that when he had left college and come into the country and was free, he lived upon L10 a year, fed on bread and water, and, like George Fox, wore a leather suit.  Thus released from all worldly cares, he says, through God’s blessing, “I live a free and kingly life as if the world were turned again into Eden, or much more, as it is at this day.”

In Emily Bronte we have an unusual type of mystic.  Indeed she is one of the most strange and baffling figures in our literature.  We know in truth very little about her, but that little is quite unlike what we know about any one else.  It is now beginning to be realised that she was a greater and more original genius than her famous sister, and that strong as were Charlotte’s passion and imagination, the passion and imagination of Emily were still stronger.  She had, so far as we can tell, peculiarly little actual experience of life, her material interests were bounded by her family, the old servant Tabby, the dogs, and the moors.  For the greater part of her thirty years of life she did the work of a servant in the little parsonage house on the edge of the graveyard.  She can have read little of philosophy or metaphysics, and probably had never heard of the mystics; she was brought up in a narrow, crude, and harshly material creed; yet her own inner experience, her touch with the secret of life, enabled her to write the remarkable series of poems the peculiar and haunting quality of which has as yet scarcely been recognised.  They are strong and free and certain, hampered by no dogma, weighted by no explanation, but containing—­in the simplest language—­the record of the experience and the vision of a soul.  Emily Bronte lived remote, unapproachable, self-sufficing and entirely detached, yet consumed with a fierce, unquenchable love of life and of nature, of the life which withheld from her all the gifts most prized of men, love, friendship, experience, recognition, fame; and of the nature which she knew only on a circumscribed space of the wild Yorkshire moors.

In her poems her mysticism is seen principally in two ways:  in her unerring apprehension of values, of the illusory quality of material things, even of the nature she so loved, together with the certain vision of the one Reality behind all forms.  This, and her description of ecstasy, of the all-sufficing joy of the inner life of one who has tasted this experience, mark her out as being among those who have seen, and who know.  In The Prisoner, the speaker, a woman, is “confined in triple walls,” yet in spite of bolts and bars and dungeon gloom she holds within herself an inextinguishable joy and unmeasured freedom brought to her every night by a “messenger.”