None shall sink to everlasting woe
Who have not well deserved the wrath of Heaven,
she presently relents, and tacks on a poem in a lighter measure, expressing her hope
That soon the wicked shall at last
Be fitted for the skies;
And when their dreadful doom is past
To light and life arise.
It is said (Charlotte said it) that Anne suffered from religious melancholy of a peculiarly dark and Calvinistic type. I very much suspect that Anne's melancholy, like Branwell's passion, was pathological, and that what her soul suffered from was religious doubt. She could not reach that height where Emily moved serenely; she could not see that
Vain are the thousand creeds
That move men's hearts: unutterably vain.
There was a time when her tremulous, clinging faith was broken by contact with Emily's contempt for creeds. When Anne was at Haworth she and Emily were inseparable. They tramped the moors together. With their arms round each other's shoulders, they paced up and down the parlour of the Parsonage. They showed the mysterious attraction and affinity of opposites. Anne must have been fascinated, and at the same time appalled, by the radiant, revealing, annihilating sweep of Emily's thought. She was not indifferent to creeds. But you can see her fearful and reluctant youth yielding at last to Emily's thought, until she caught a glimpse of the "repose" beyond the clash of "conquered good and conquering ill". You can see how the doctrine of eternal punishment went by the board; how Anne, who had gone through agonies of orthodox fear on account of Branwell, must have adjusted things somehow, and arrived at peace. Trust in "the merits of the Redeemer" is, after all, trust in the Immensity beyond Redeemer and redeemed. Of this trust she sang in a voice, like her material voice, fragile, but sweet and true. She sang naïvely of the "Captive Dove" that makes unheard its "joyless moan", of "the heart that Nature formed to love", pining, "neglected and alone". She sang of the "Narrow Way", "Be it," she sings, "thy constant aim
"To labour and to love,
To pardon and endure,
To lift thy heart to God above,
And keep thy conscience pure."
She hears the wind in an alien wood and cries for the Parsonage garden, and for the "barren hills":
Where scarce the scattered, stunted trees
Can yield an answering swell,
But where a wilderness of heath
Returns the sound as well.
For yonder garden, fair and wide,
With groves of evergreen,
Long winding walks, and borders trim
And velvet lawns between.