Page:Oxford Book of English Verse 1250-1918.djvu/925

 ��EMILY BRONTE 744 Stanza

I FTEN rebuked, yet always back returning

To those first feelings that were born with me, And leaving busy chase of wealth and learning For idle dreams of things which cannot be:

To-day I will seek not the shadowy region;

Its unsustaining vastness waxes drear; And visions rising, legion after legion,

Bring the unreal world too strangely near.

I'll walk, but not in old heroic traces,

And not in paths of high morality, And not among the half-distmguish'd faces,

The clouded forms of long-past history.

I'll walk when my own nature would be leading: It vexes me to choose another guide:

Where the grey flocks in ferny glens are feeding, Where the wild wind blows on the mountain side.

The Prisoner

STILL let my tyrants know, I am not doom'd to wear Year after year in gloom and desolate despair; 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, And visions rise, and change, that kill me with desire.

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