Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish,
How could I seek the empty world again?

The speaker contrasts an intense, almost sacred suffering (“divinest anguish”) with the shallowness of ordinary social life (“the empty world”). The lines suggest that a profound emotional or spiritual experience—often love, grief, or visionary longing—changes one’s scale of values: after tasting that depth, conventional pleasures and ambitions feel hollow. Brontë’s poetry frequently treats solitude, inner passion, and the sublime (especially in nature) as more real than society’s routines, and this couplet captures that Romantic conviction that pain can be ennobling or revelatory. The rhetorical question implies irreversibility: once awakened to intensity, the self cannot return to complacency.