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.
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