LiederNet logo

CONTENTS

×
  • Home | Introduction
  • Composers (20,257)
  • Text Authors (19,749)
  • Go to a Random Text
  • What’s New
  • A Small Tour
  • FAQ & Links
  • Donors
  • DONATE

UTILITIES

  • Search Everything
  • Search by Surname
  • Search by Title or First Line
  • Search by Year
  • Search by Collection

CREDITS

  • Emily Ezust
  • Contributors (1,116)
  • Contact Information
  • Bibliography

  • Copyright Statement
  • Privacy Policy

Follow us on Facebook

by Emily Brontë (1818 - 1848)

The Messenger
Language: English 
He comes with western winds, with evening's wandering airs,
With that clear dusk of heaven that brings the thickest stars;
Winds take a pensive tone, and stars a tender fire
And visions rise and change which kill me with desire
Desire for nothing known in my maturer years,
When joy grew mad with awe at counting future tears;

But first, a hush of peace, a soundless calm descends;
The struggle of distress and fierce impatience ends;
Mute music soothes my breast, unuttered harmony
That I could never dream till earth was lost to me
Then dawns the Invisible, the Unseen its truth reveals;
My outward sense is gone, my inward essence feels
Its wings are almost free, its home, its harbor found;
Measuring the gulf, it stoops and dares the final bound!

O dreadful is the check, intense the agony
When the ear begins to hear and the eye begins to see
When the pulse begins to throb, the brain to think again,
The soul to feel the flesh and the flesh to feel the chain!

Text Authorship:

  • by Emily Brontë (1818 - 1848) [author's text not yet checked against a primary source]

Musical settings (art songs, Lieder, mélodies, (etc.), choral pieces, and other vocal works set to this text), listed by composer (not necessarily exhaustive):

  • by John Mitchell (b. 1941), "The Messenger", op. 17 no. 10 (1976), from Visions from the Earth, no. 10. [
     text verified 1 time
    ]

Researcher for this page: Victoria Brago

This text was added to the website between May 1995 and September 2003.
Line count: 18
Word count: 176

Gentle Reminder

This website began in 1995 as a personal project by Emily Ezust, who has been working on it full-time without a salary since 2008. Our research has never had any government or institutional funding, so if you found the information here useful, please consider making a donation. Your help is greatly appreciated!
–Emily Ezust, Founder

Donate

We use cookies for internal analytics and to earn much-needed advertising revenue. (Did you know you can help support us by turning off ad-blockers?) To learn more, see our Privacy Policy. To learn how to opt out of cookies, please visit this site.

I acknowledge the use of cookies

Contact
Copyright
Privacy

Copyright © 2025 The LiederNet Archive

Site redesign by Shawn Thuris