her long hair till the comb slips from her fingers.

That is worth all the reams, the terrible reams that have been written
about Charlotte.

There can be no doubt that Emily Bronte found her shelter behind
Charlotte's fame; but she was protected most of all by the
unapproachable, the unique and baffling quality of her temperament and
of her genius. Her own people seem to have felt it; Charlotte herself in
that preface to _Wuthering Heights_, which stands as her last
vindication and eulogy of her dead sister, even Charlotte betrays a
curious reservation and reluctance. You feel that Emily's genius
inspired her with a kind of sacred terror.

Charlotte destroyed all records of her sister except her poems. Between
six and seven hundred of her own letters have been published; there are
two of Emily's. They tell little or nothing. And there was that diary
she kept for Anne, where she notes with extreme brevity the things that
are happening in her family. There never was a diary wherein the soul of
the diarist was so well concealed.

And yet, because of this silence, this absence of legend and conjecture,
we see Emily Bronte more clearly than we can ever hope to see Charlotte
now. Though hardly anything is known of her, what _is_ known is
authentic; it comes straight from those who knew and loved her: from
Charlotte, from Ellen Nussey, from the servants at the Parsonage. Even
of her outward and visible presence we have a clearer image. The lines
are fewer, but they are more vivid. You see her tall and slender, in her
rough clothes, tramping the moors with the form and the step of a virile
adolescent. Shirley, the "_bete fauve_", is Emily civilized. You see her
head carried high and crowned with its long, dark hair, coiled simply,
caught up with a comb. You see her face, honey-pale, her slightly high,
slightly aquiline nose; her beautiful eyes, dark-grey, luminous; the
"kind, kindling, liquid eyes" that Ellen Nussey saw; and their look, one
moment alert, intent, and the next, inaccessibly remote.

I have seen such kind and kindling eyes in the face of a visionary, born
with a profound, incurable indifference to the material event; for whom
the Real is the incredible, unapparent harmony that flows above,
beneath, and within the gross flux of appearances. To him it is the sole
thing real. That kind and kindling look I know to be simply a light
reflected from the surface of the dream. It is anything but cold; it has
indeed a