"Jane, do you hear that nightingale singing in the wood?" "A waft of
wind came sweeping down the laurel walk, and trembled through the boughs
of the chestnut; it wandered away to an infinite distance. . . The
nightingale's voice was then the only voice of the hour; in listening I
again wept."

* * * * *

Whereas Charlotte Bronte walked, with exultation and enterprise, upon the
road of symbols, under the guidance of her own visiting genius, Emily
seldom went out upon those far avenues. She was one who practised
imagery sparingly. Her style had the key of an inner prose which seems
to leave imagery behind in the way of approaches--the apparelled and
arrayed approaches and ritual of literature--and so to go further and to
be admitted among simple realities and antitypes.

Charlotte Bronte also knew that simple goal, but she loved her imagery.
In the passage of _Jane Eyre_ that tells of the return to Thornfield
Hall, in ruins by fire, she bespeaks her reader's romantic attention to
an image which in truth is not all golden. She has moments, on the other
hand, of pure narrative, whereof each word is such a key as I spoke of
but now, and unlocks an inner and an inner plain door of spiritual
realities. There is, perhaps, no author who, simply telling what
happened, tells it with so great a significance: "Jane, did you hear that
nightingale singing in the wood?" and "She made haste to leave us." But
her characteristic calling is to images, those avenues and temples
oracular, and to the vision of symbols.

You may hear the poet of great imagery praised as a great mystic.
Nevertheless, although a great mystical poet makes images, he does not do