Page:Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë, 1846).djvu/79

Rh And still the undulating gloom

Mocks sight with formless motion;

Was such sensation Jonah's doom,

Gulphed in the depths of ocean?

Streaking the air, the nameless vision,

Fast-driven, deep-sounding, flows;

Oh! whence its source, and what its mission?

How will its terrors close?

Long-sweeping, rushing, vast and void,

The Universe it swallows;

And still the dark, devouring tide,

A Typhoon tempest follows.

More slow it rolls; its furious race

Sinks to a solemn gliding;

The stunning roar, the wind's wild chase,

To stillness are subsiding.

And, slowly borne along, a form

The shapeless chaos varies;

Poised in the eddy toof [sic] the storm,

Before the eye it tarries.

A woman drowned—sunk in the deep,

On a long wave reclining;

The circling waters' crystal sweep,

Like glass, her shape enshrining;

Her pale dead face, to Gilbert turned,

Seems as in sleep reposing;

A feeble light, now first discerned,

The features well disclosing.