Often rebuked, yet always back returningTo those first feelings that were born with me,And leaving busy chase of wealth and learningFor 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 grey 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 feelingCan centre both the worlds of Heaven and Hell.
The following are the last lines my sister Emily ever wrote:—
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 creedsThat move men’s hearts: unutterably vain;Worthless as withered weeds,Or idlest froth amid the boundless main,
To waken doubt in oneHolding so fast by thine infinity;So surely anchored onThe stedfast rock of immortality.
With wide-embracing loveThy 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 were left alone,Every existence would exist in Thee.
There is not room for Death,Nor atom that his might could render void:Thou—THOU art Being and Breath,And what THOU art may never be destroyed.
Selections from Poems by Acton Bell
In looking over my sister Anne’s papers, I find mournful evidence that religious feeling had been to her but too much like what it was to Cowper; I mean, of course, in a far milder form. Without rendering her a prey to those horrors that defy concealment, it subdued her mood and bearing to a perpetual pensiveness; the pillar of a cloud glided constantly before her eyes; she ever waited at the foot of a secret Sinai, listening in her heart to the voice of a trumpet sounding long and waxing louder. Some, perhaps, would rejoice over these tokens of sincere though sorrowing piety in a deceased relative: I own, to me they seem sad, as if her whole innocent life had been passed under the martyrdom of an unconfessed physical pain: their effect, indeed, would be too distressing, were it not combated by the certain knowledge that in her last moments this tyranny of a too tender conscience was overcome; this pomp of terrors broke up, and passing away, left her dying hour unclouded. Her belief in God did not then bring to her dread, as of a stern Judge,—but hope, as in a Creator and Saviour: and no faltering hope was it, but a sure and stedfast conviction, on which, in the rude passage from Time to Eternity, she threw the weight of her human weakness, and by which she was enabled to bear what was to be borne, patiently—serenely—victoriously.