Thursday Verse: "Often Rebuked, Yet Always Back Returning" - Emily Bronte

Often Rebuked, Yet Always Back Returning

Often rebuked, yet always back returning
       To those first feelings that were born with me,
And leaving busy chase of wealth and learning
       For idle dreams of things which cannot be:

Today, I will seek not the shadowy region;
       In 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 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 they gray flocks in ferny glens are feeding,
       Where the wild wind blows on the mountainside.

What have those lonely mountains worth revealing?
       More glory and more grief than I can tell:
The earth that wakes one human heart to feeling
       Can center both the worlds of Heaven and Hell

  - Emily Bronte