'Introduction.' {0} Just before those lines there are two or
three verses which it is worth while to compare with a poem of Anne's
called 'Home.' Emily was sixteen at the time of writing; Anne about
twenty-one or twenty-two. Both sisters take for their motive the exile's
longing thought of home. Emily's lines are full of faults, but they have
the indefinable quality--here, no doubt, only in the bud, only as a
matter of promise--which Anne's are entirely without. From the twilight
schoolroom at Roehead, Emily turns in thought to the distant upland of
Haworth and the little stone-built house upon its crest:--

There is a spot, 'mid barren hills,
Where winter howls, and driving rain;
But, if the dreary tempest chills,
There is a light that warms again.

The house is old, the trees are bare,
Moonless above bends twilight's dome,
But what on earth is half so dear--
So longed for--as the hearth of home?

The mute bird sitting on the stone,
The dank moss dripping from the wall,
The thorn-trees gaunt, the walks o'ergrown,
I love them--how I love them all!

Anne's verses, written from one of the houses where she was a governess,
express precisely the same feeling, and movement of mind. But notice the
instinctive rightness and swiftness of Emily's, the blurred weakness of
Anne's!--

For yonder garden, fair and wide,
With groves of evergreen,
Long winding walks, and borders trim,
And velvet lawns between--

Restore to me that little spot,
With gray walls compassed round,
Where knotted grass neglected lies,
And weeds usurp the ground.

Though all around this mansion high
Invites the foot to roam,
And though its halls are fair within--
Oh, give me back my Home!

A similar parallel lies between Anne's lines 'Domestic Peace,'--a sad and
true reflection of the terrible times with Branwell in 1846--and Emily's
'Wanderer from the Fold'; while in Emily's 'Last Lines,' the daring
spirit of the sister to whom the magic gift was granted separates itself
for ever from the gentle and accustomed piety of the sister to whom it
was denied. Yet Anne's 'Last Lines'--'I hoped that with the brave and
strong'--have sweetness and sincerity; they have gained and kept a place
in English religious verse, and they must always appeal to those who love
the Brontes because, in the language of Christian faith and submission,
they