perverted passion and passionate perversity.

Heathcliff, indeed, stands unredeemed; never once swerving in his
arrow-straight course to perdition, from the time when 'the little
black-haired swarthy thing, as dark as if it came from the Devil,'
was first unrolled out of the bundle and set on its feet in the
farmhouse kitchen, to the hour when Nelly Dean found the grim,
stalwart corpse laid on its back in the panel-enclosed bed, with
wide-gazing eyes that seemed 'to sneer at her attempt to close
them, and parted lips and sharp white teeth that sneered too.'

Heathcliff betrays one solitary human feeling, and that is NOT his
love for Catherine; which is a sentiment fierce and inhuman: a
passion such as might boil and glow in the bad essence of some evil
genius; a fire that might form the tormented centre--the ever-
suffering soul of a magnate of the infernal world: and by its
quenchless and ceaseless ravage effect the execution of the decree
which dooms him to carry Hell with him wherever he wanders. No;
the single link that connects Heathcliff with humanity is his
rudely-confessed regard for Hareton Earnshaw--the young man whom he
has ruined; and then his half-implied esteem for Nelly Dean. These
solitary traits omitted, we should say he was child neither of
Lascar nor gipsy, but a man's shape animated by demon life--a
Ghoul--an Afreet.

Whether it is right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff,
I do not know: I scarcely think it is. But this I know: the
writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he
is not always master--something that, at times, strangely wills and
works for itself. He may lay down rules and devise principles, and