| Edmund Clarence Stedman, ed. (1833–1908). A Victorian Anthology, 1837–1895. 1895. |
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| Stanzas |
| | | Emily Brontë (1818–48) |
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| OFTEN rebuk’d, 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; | |
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| To-day, I will seek not the shadowy region; | 5 |
| Its unsustaining vastness waxes drear; | |
| And visions rising, legion after legion, | |
| Bring the unreal world too strangely near. | |
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| I ’ll walk, but not in old heroic traces, | |
| And not in paths of high morality, | 10 |
| And not among the half-distinguish’d faces, | |
| The clouded forms of long-past history. | |
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| I ’ll walk where my own nature would be leading: | |
| It vexes me to choose another guide: | |
| Where the gray flocks in ferny glens are feeding; | 15 |
| Where the wild wind blows on the mountain side. | |
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| What have those lonely mountains worth revealing? | |
| More glory and more grief than I can tell: | |
| The earth that wakes one human heart to feeling | |
| Can centre both the worlds of Heaven and Hell. | 20 |
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