The Norton Anthology of English literature. Volume 2

1. An excerpt from a poem in the Gondal manu- printed as "The Prisoner: A Fragment" in Poems script, "Julian M. and A. G. Rochelle," describing (I 846) by the Bronte sisters. The speaker, a man, an event unplaced in the story, this poem was is visiting a dungeon in his father's castle.

 .

131 6 / EMILY BRONTE

And I am rough and rude, yet not more rough to see Than is the hidden ghost which has its home in me!"

About her lips there played a smile of almost scorn:

30 "My friend," she gently said, "you have not heard me mourn; When you my kindred's lives�my lost life, can restore Then may I weep and sue�but never, Friend, before!

"Still, let my tyrants know, I am not doomed to wear Year after year in gloom and desolate despair; 35 A messenger of Hope comes every night to me, And offers, for short life, eternal liberty.

"He comes with western winds, with evening's wandering airs, With that clear dusk of heaven that brings the thickest stars; Winds take a pensive tone, and stars a tender fire,

40 And visions rise and change that kill me with desire�

"Desire for nothing known in my maturer years When joy grew mad with awe at counting future tears; When, if my spirit's sky was full of flashes warm, I knew not whence they came, from sun or thunderstorm;

45 "But first a hush of peace, a soundless calm descends; The struggle of distress and fierce impatience ends; Mute music soothes my breast�unuttered harmony That I could never dream till earth was lost to me.

"Then dawns the Invisible, the Unseen its truth reveals;

50 My outward sense is gone, my inward essence feels� Its wings are almost free, its home, its harbour found; Measuring the gulf it stoops and dares the final bound!

"Oh, dreadful is the check�intense the agony When the ear begins to hear and the eye begins to see; 55 When the pulse begins to throb, the brain to think again, The soul to feel the flesh and the flesh to feel the chain!

"Yet I would lose no sting, would wish no torture less; The more that anguish racks the earlier it will bless; And robed in fires of Hell, or bright with heavenly shine,

60 If it but herald Death, the vision is divine."2

She ceased to speak, and we, unanswering turned to go� We had no further power to work the captive woe; Her cheek, her gleaming eye, declared that man had given A sentence unapproved, and overruled by Heaven.

1845 1846

2. Cf. the words of the dying Catherine in Wuth- escape into that glorious world, and to be always ering Heights (1847), chap. 15: "The thing that irks there....! shall be incomparably beyond and me most is this shattered prison [my body]. . . . I'm above you all." tired, tired of being enclosed here. I'm wearying to

 .

JOHN RUSKIN / 1317

No coward soul is mine1

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

5 O God within my breast Almighty ever-present Deity Life, that in me hast rest As I Undying Life, have power in Thee

Vain are the thousand creeds

10 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 thy infinity is So surely anchored on The steadfast rock of Immortality

With wide-embracing love Thy spirit animates eternal years Pervades and broods above,

20 Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates and rears

Though Earth and moon were gone And suns and universes ceased to be And thou wert left alone Every Existence would exist in thee

25 There is not room for Death Nor atom that his might could render void Since thou art Being and Breath And what thou art may never be destroyed.

1846 1850

1. According to Charlotte Bronte, these are the last lines her sister wrote. JOHN RUSKIN 1819-1900

John Ruskin was both the leading Victorian critic of art and an important critic of society. These two roles can be traced back to two important influences of his childhood. His father, a wealthy wine merchant, enjoyed travel, and on tours of the Continent he introduced his son to landscapes, architecture, and art. From this exposure Ruskin acquired a zest for beauty that animates even the most theoretical of his

 .

131 8 / JOHN RUSKIN

discussions of aesthetics. In his tranquil autobiography (titled Praeterita, 1885�89, or, as he said, "Past things"), composed in the penultimate decade of a turbulent life, Ruskin reflected on the profound experience of his first view of the Swiss Alps at sunset. For his fourteen-year-old self, he writes, "the seen walls of lost Eden could not have been more beautiful":