To this summer day's decay,
Does our earth feel aught of Heaven,
Can the voice of Nature pray?'
What, in short, is the harmonious and sympathetic spell that breathes through Nature?
The wild places of the earth, mountains and moorlands, where the storms raged, and the great winds blew, were nearest akin to the Titanic genius of Branwell and Emily. Thus, in the sonnet, the everlasting majesty of Black Comb was held up by Branwell as an example to man, and as a contrast to human feebleness; and later, when his woe was most acute, he was drawn into a 'communion of vague unity' with Penmaenmawr, comparing the living, beating heart of man with the stony hill, and begging,
'Let me, like it, arise o'er mortal care,
All woes sustain, yet never know despair,
Unshrinking face the griefs I now deplore,
And stand through storm and shine like moveless Penmaenmawr.'
And, lastly, in the 'Epistle from a Father to a Child in her Grave,' we find him comparing himself with one in the midst of wild mountains: