Emily Brontë
chainless soul which to the end maintained its fortitude and rebellion.
The flesh is weak. Since I saw that relic, the strenuous verse of Emily
Bronte's last poem has seemed to me far more heroic, far more moving;
remembering in what clinging and prisoning garments that free spirit was
confined.
The flesh was weak, but Emily would grant it no indulgence. She finished
her dressing, and came very slowly, with dizzy head and tottering steps,
downstairs into the little bare parlour where Anne was working and
Charlotte writing a letter. Emily took up some work and tried to sew.
Her catching breath, her drawn and altered face were ominous of the end.
But still a little hope flickered in those sisterly hearts. "She grows
daily weaker," wrote Charlotte, on that memorable Tuesday morning;
seeing surely no portent that this--this! was to be the last of the days
and the hours of her weakness.
The morning drew on to noon, and Emily grew worse. She could no longer
speak, but--gasping in a husky whisper--she said: "If you will send for
a doctor. I will see him now!" Alas, it was too late. The shortness of
breath and rending pain increased; even Emily could no longer conceal
them. Towards two o'clock her sisters begged her, in an agony, to let
them put her to bed. "No, no," she cried; tormented with the feverish
restlessness that comes before the last, most quiet peace. She tried to
rise, leaning with one hand upon the sofa. And thus the chord of life
snapped. She was dead.
She was twenty-nine years old.
They buried her, a few days after, under the church pavement; under the
slab of stone where their mother lay, and Maria and Elizabeth and
Branwell.
She who had so mourned her brother had verily found him again, and
should sleep well at his side.
[Greek: phile met' autou keisomai, philou meta.]
And though no wind ever rustles over the grave on which no scented
heather springs, nor any bilberry bears its sprigs of greenest leaves
and purple fruit, she will not miss them now; she who wondered how any
could imagine unquiet slumbers for them that sleep in the quiet earth.
They followed her to her grave--her old father, Charlotte, the dying
Anne; and as they left the doors, they were joined by another mourner,
Keeper, Emily's dog. He walked in front of all, first in the rank of
mourners; and perhaps no other creature had known the dead woman quite
so well. When they had lain her to sleep in the dark, airless vault
under the church, and when they had crossed the bleak churchyard, and
had entered the empty house again, Keeper went straight to the door of
the room where his mistress used to sleep, and lay down across the
threshold. There he howled piteously for many days; knowing not that no
lamentations could wake her any more. Over the little parlour below a
great calm had settled. "Why should we be otherwise than calm," says
Charlotte, writing to her friend on the 21st of December. "The anguish
of seeing her suffer is over; the spectacle of the pains of death is
gone by; the funeral day is past. We feel she is at peace. No need now
to tremble for the hard frost and the keen wind. Emily does not feel
them."
The death was over, indeed, and the funeral day was past; yet one duty
remained to the heart-wrung mourners, not less poignant than the sight
of the dead changed face, not less crushing than the thud of stones and
clods on the coffin of one beloved. They took the great brown desk in
which she used to keep her papers, and sorted and put in order all that
they found in it. How appealing the sight of that hurried, casual
writing of a hand now stark in death! How precious each of those pages
whose like should never be made again till the downfall of the earth in
the end of time! How near, how utterly cut-off, the Past!
They found no novel, half-finished or begun, in the old brown desk which
she used to rest on her knees, sitting under the thorns. But they
discovered a poem, written at the end of Emily's life, profound,
sincere, as befits the last words one has time to speak. It is the most
perfect and expressive of her work: the fittest monument to her heroic
spirit.
Thus run the last lines she ever traced:
"No coward soul is mine,
No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere;
I see heaven's glories shine,
And faith shines equal, arming me from fear.
"O God, within my breast,
Almighty, ever-present Deity!
Life, that in me has rest,
As I--undying life--have power in Thee.
"Vain are the thousand creeds
That move men's hearts: unutterably vain;
Worthless as withered weeds,
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main,
"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,
No atom that his might could render void;
Thou--Thou art Being, Breath,
And what Thou art may never be destroyed."
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 31: Mrs. Gaskell.]
FINIS!
"She died in a time of promise."
So writes Charlotte, in the first flush of her grief. "She died in a
time of promise;" having done much, indeed, having done enough to bring
her powers to ripe perfection. And the fruit of that perfection is
denied us. She died, between the finishing of labour and the award of
praise. Before the least hint of the immortality that has been awarded
her could reach her in her obscure and distant home. Without one success
in all her life, with her school never kept, her verses never read, her
novel never praised, her brother dead in ruin. All her ambitions had
flagged and died of the blight. But she was still young, ready to live,
eager to try again.
"She died in a time of promise. We saw her taken from life in its
prime."
Truly a prime of sorrow, the dark mid-hour of the storm, dark with the
grief gone by and the blackness of the on-coming grief. With Branwell
dead, with her dearest sister dying, Emily died. Had she lived, what
profit could she have made of her life? For us, indeed, it would have
been well; but for her? Fame in solitude is bitter food; and Anne will
die in May; and Charlotte six years after; and Emily never could make
new friends. Better far for her, that loving, faithful spirit, to die
while still her life was dear, while still there was hope in the world,
than to linger on a few years longer, in loneliness and weakness, to
quit in fame and misery a disillusioned life.
"She died in a time of promise. We saw her taken from life in its prime.
But it is God's will, and the place where she is gone is better than
that she has left."
Truly better, to leave her soul to speak in the world for aye, for the
wind to be stronger for her breath, and the heather more purple from her
heart; better far to be lost in the all-embracing, all-transmuting
process of life, than to live in cramped and individual pain. So at
least, wrong or right, thought this woman who loved the earth so well.
She was not afraid to die. The thought of death filled her with no
perplexities; but with assured and happy calm. She held it more glorious
than fame, and sweeter than love, to give her soul to God and her body
to the earth. And which of us shall carp at the belief which made a very
painful life contented?
"The thing that irks me most is this shattered prison, after all. I'm
tired of being enclosed here. I'm wearying to escape into that glorious
world, and to be always there; not seeing it dimly through tears, and
yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart; but really with it
and in it. You think you are better and more fortunate than I, in full
health and strength; you are sorry for me--very soon that will be
altered. I shall be sorry for you. I shall be incomparably above and
beyond you all."[32]
Ah, yes; incomparably above and beyond. Not only because of the keen
vision with which she has revealed the glorious world in which her
memory is fresher wind, and brighter sunshine, not only for that; but
because the remembrance of her living self is a most high and noble
precept. Never before were hands so inspired alike for daily drudgery
and for golden writing never to fade. Never was any heart more
honourable and strong, nor any more pitiful to shameful weakness.
Seldom, indeed, has any man, more seldom still any woman, owned the
inestimable gift of genius and never once made it an excuse for a
weakness, a violence, a failing, which in other mortals we condemn. No
deed of hers requires such apology. Therefore, being dead she persuades
us to honour; and not only her works but the memory of her life shall
rise up and praise her, who lived without praise so well.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 32: 'Wuthering Heights.']
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