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.
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