Charlotte Bronte's noblest passages are her own speech or the speech of
one like herself acting the central part in the dreams and dramas of
emotion that she had kept from her girlhood--the unavowed custom of the
ordinary girl by her so splendidly avowed in a confidence that comprised
the world. Emily had no such confessions to publish. She contrived--but
the word does not befit her singular spirit of liberty, that knew nothing
of stealth--to remove herself from the world; as her person left no pen-
portrait, so her "I" is not heard here. She lends her voice in disguise
to her men and women; the first narrator of her great romance is a young
man, the second a servant woman; this one or that among the actors takes
up the story, and her great words sound at times in paltry mouths. It is
then that for a moment her reader seems about to come into her immediate
presence, but by a fiction she denies herself to him. To a somewhat
trivial girl (or a girl who would be trivial in any other book, but Emily
Bronte seems unable to create anything consistently meagre)--to Isabella
Linton she commits one of her most memorable passages, and one which has
the rare image, one of a terrifying little company of visions amid
terrifying facts: "His attention was roused, I saw, for his eyes rained
down tears among the ashes. . . The clouded windows of hell flashed for a
moment towards me; the fiend which usually looked out was so dimmed and
drowned." But in Heathcliff's own speech there is no veil or
circumstance. "I'm too happy; and yet I'm not happy enough. My soul's
bliss kills my body, but does not satisfy itself." "I have to remind
myself to breathe, and almost to remind my heart to beat." "Being alone,
and conscious two yards of loose earth was the sole barrier between us, I
said to myself: 'I'll have her in my arms again.' If she be cold, I'll
think it is this north wind that chills me; and if she be motionless, it
is sleep." What art, moreover, what knowledge, what a fresh ear for the
clash of repetition; what a chime in that phrase: "I dreamt I was
sleeping the last sleep by that sleeper, with my heart stopped, and my