"Oh, let me die—that power and will
Their cruel strife may close;
And conquered good, and conquering ill
Be lost in one repose!"
Some semblance of coherence may, no doubt, be given to this poem by making the three first and the last stanzas to be spoken by the questioner, and the fourth by the philosopher. Even so, the subject has little charm. What we care for is the surprising energy with which the successive images are projected, the earnest ring of the verse, the imagination which invests all its changes. The man and the philosopher are but the clumsy machinery of the magic-lantern, the more kept out of view the better.
"Conquered good and conquering ill!" A thought that must often have risen in Emily's mind during this year and those succeeding. A gloomy thought, sufficiently strange in a country parson's daughter; one destined to have a great result in her work.
Of these visions which make the larger half of Emily's contribution to the tiny book, none has a more eerie grace than this day-dream of the 5th of March, 1844, sampled here by a few verses snatched out of their setting rudely enough:—
"On a sunny brae, alone I lay
One summer afternoon;
It was the marriage-time of May
With her young lover, June.
****
"The trees did wave their plumy crests,
The glad birds carolled clear;
And I, of all the wedding guests,
Was only sullen there.
