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The following poem was written by Emily Bronte:
              

 The Old Stoic
Riches I hold in light esteem,
And Love I laugh to scorn;
And lust of Fame was but a dream
That vanished with the morn.

And if I pray, the only prayer
That moves my lips for me
Is, “Leave the heart that now I bear,
And give me liberty!”

Yes, as my swift days near their goal,
‘Tis all that I implore:
In life and death a chainless soul,
With courage to endure.

Post-reading activities:
- The poem can be considered to contain the ‘programme’ of Emily’s life. What are the greatest priorities for her? What did she come not to value in life and why? 
- Were the ideas expressed in the poem reflected in the novels by Emily and Charlotte Bronte? In what way?  
- What are the most valuable things in life for you? 

These extracts are from “De Profundis” (Wilde’s confession, written in prison as a letter to his friend Alfred Douglas and published in 1905)

    The gods had given me almost everything. I had a genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliancy, intellectual daring. ... I treated art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction. ... But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. ... Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both. I grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the house tops. ... I ceased to be lord over myself. I was no longer the captain of my soul, and did not know it. I allowed pleasure to dominate me. I ended in horrible disgrace! There is only one thing for me now, absolute humility ... something tells me that nothing in the whole world is meaningless, and suffering least of all.
    I am completely penniless, and absolutely homeless. Yet there are worse things in the world than that I am quite candid when I say that rather than go out from this prison with bitterness in my heart against the world, I would gladly and readily beg my bread from door to door. If I got nothing from the house of the rich I would get something at the house of the poor. Those who have much are often greedy; those who have little always share.
    Religion does not help me. The faith that others give to what is unseen, I give to what one can touch, and look at. My gods dwell in temples made with hands; and within the circle of actual experience is my creed made perfect and complete: too complete, it may be, for like many or all of those who have placed their heaven in this earth, I have found in it not merely the beauty of heaven, but the horror of hell also.

Post-reading activities:
- What problems does Wilde dwell upon in his letter? Does he say anything about his art? How are art and his personal experience intertwined in his life? 
- Why, in his opinion, is he undergoing such sufferings now? What are they the result of? 
- Can you agree to any of his thoughts?