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By Emily Brontë

Often 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-distinguished faces,
    The clouded forms of long-past history.


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;
    Where the wild wind blows on the mountain side.


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.


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Poet Bio

Emily Brontë
Emily Brontë’s first verses appeared in a book with work by her sisters Charlotte and Anne, pseudonymously titled Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell in order to conceal the authors’ gender. Emily’s poems are distinguished from her siblings’ by their sober tone and visionary spirituality, qualities also found in her famous novel, Wuthering Heights. See More By This Poet

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