Give we the hills our equal prayer, Earth's breezy hills and heaven's blue sea, _I ask for nothing further here Than my own heart and liberty._ And here is another poem, of a sterner and a sadder stoicism: There was a time when my cheek burned To give such scornful words the lie, Ungoverned nature madly spurned The law that bade it not defy. Oh, in the days of ardent youth I would have given my life for truth. For truth, for right, for liberty, I would have gladly, freely died; And now I calmly bear and see The vain man smile, the fool deride, Though not because my heart is tame, Though not for fear, though not for shame. My soul still chokes at every tone Of selfish and self-clouded error; My breast still braves the world alone, Steeled as it ever was to terror. Only I know, howe'er I frown, The same world will go rolling on. October 1839. It is the worldly wisdom of twenty-one! * * * * * If this, the ballad and the rest, were all, the world would still be richer, by a wholly new conception of Emily Brontë, of her resources and her range. But it is by no means all. And here we come to the opportunity which, owing to that temporary decline of fervour, Mr. Shorter has so unfortunately missed. He might have picked out of the mass wherein they lie scattered, all but lost, sometimes barely recognizable, the fragments of a Titanic epic. He might have done something to build up again the fabric of that marvellous romance, that continuous dream, that stupendous and gorgeous fantasy in which Emily Brontë, for at least eleven years, lived and moved and had her being.