genii-life. Buoyant, by green steps, by glad hills, all
verdure and light, she reaches a station scarcely lower than that whence
angels looked down on the dreamer of Bethel, and her eye seeks, and her
soul possesses, the vision of life as she wishes it."

"Her eye seeks, and her soul possesses, the vision of life as she wishes
it--" That was the secret of Emily's greatness, of her immeasurable
superiority to her sad sisters.

And again: "In Shirley's nature prevailed at times an easy indolence:
there were periods when she took delight in perfect vacancy of hand and
eye--moments when her thoughts, her simple existence, the fact of the
world being around--and heaven above her, seemed to yield her such
fulness of happiness, that she did not need to lift a finger to increase
the joy. Often, after an active morning, she would spend a sunny
afternoon in lying stirless on the turf, at the foot of some tree of
friendly umbrage: no society did she need but that of Caroline, and it
sufficed if she were within call; no spectacle did she ask but that of
the deep blue sky, and such cloudlets as sailed afar and aloft across
its span; no sound but that of the bee's hum, the leaf's whisper."

There are phrases in Louis Moore's diary that bring Emily Bronte
straight before us in her swift and vivid life. Shirley is "Sister of
the spotted, bright, quick-fiery leopard." "Pantheress!--beautiful
forest-born!--wily, tameless, peerless nature! She gnaws her chain. I
see the white teeth working at the steel! She has dreams of her wild
woods, and pinings after virgin freedom." "How evanescent, fugitive,
fitful she looked--slim and swift as a Northern streamer!" "... With
her long hair flowing full and wavy; with her noiseless step, her pale
cheek, her eye full of night and lightning, she looked, I thought,
spirit-like--a thing made of an element--the child of a breeze and a
flame--the daughter of ray and raindrop--a thing never to be overtaken,
arrested, fixed."

Like Emily she is not "caught". "But if I were," she says, "do you know
what soothsayers I would consult?... The little Irish beggar that comes
barefoot to my door; the mouse that steals out of the cranny in the
wainscot; the bird that in frost and snow pecks at my window for a
crumb; the dog that licks my hand and sits beside my knee."

And yet again: "She takes her sewing occasionally: but, by some
fatality, she is doomed never to sit steadily at it for above five
minutes at a