They followed her to her grave—her old father, Charlotte, the dying Anne; and as they left the doors, they were joined by another mourner, Keeper, Emily's dog. He walked in front of all, first in the rank of mourners; and perhaps no other creature had known the dead woman quite so well. When they had lain her to sleep in the dark, airless vault under the church, and when they had crossed the bleak churchyard, and had entered the empty house again, Keeper went straight to the door of the room where his mistress used to sleep, and lay down across the threshold. There he howled piteously for many days; knowing not that no lamentations could wake her any more. Over the little parlour below a great calm had settled. "Why should we be otherwise than calm," says Charlotte, writing to her friend on the 21st of December. "The anguish of seeing her suffer is over; the spectacle of the pains of death is gone by; the funeral day is past. We feel she is at peace. No need now to tremble for the hard frost and the keen wind. Emily does not feel them."
The death was over, indeed, and the funeral day was past; yet one duty remained to the heart-wrung mourners, not less poignant than the sight of the dead changed face, not less crushing than the thud of stones and clods on the coffin of one beloved. They took the great brown desk in which she used to keep her papers, and sorted and put in order all that they found in it. How appealing the sight of that hurried, casual writing of a hand now stark in death! How precious each of those pages whose like should never be made again till the downfall of the earth in the end of time! How near, how utterly cut-off, the Past!
They found no novel, half-finished or begun, in the old brown desk which she used to rest on her knees, sitting under the thorns. But they discovered a poem, written at the end of Emily's life, profound, sincere, as befits the last words one has time to speak. It is the most perfect and expressive of her work: the fittest monument to her heroic spirit.
Thus run the last lines she ever traced:
"No coward soul is mine,
No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere;
I see heaven's glories shine,
And faith shines equal, arming me from fear.
"O God, within my breast,
Almighty, ever-present Deity!
Life, that in me has rest,
As I—undying life—have power in Thee.
"Vain are the thousand creeds
That move men's hearts: unutterably vain;
Worthless as withered weeds,
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main,
"To waken doubt in one
Holding so fast by thine infinity;
So surely anchored on
The steadfast rock of immortality.
"With wide-embracing love
Thy spirit animates eternal years,
Pervades and broods above,
Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates, and rears.
"Though earth and man were gone,
And suns and universes ceased to be,
And Thou wert left alone,
Every existence would exist in Thee.