; nor friendship, nor love,
nor vision of love. All these things "passed her by with averted head";
and she stood in her inviolable serenity and watched them go, without
putting out her hand to one of them. You cannot surprise her in any
piteous gesture of desire or regret. And, unlike Charlotte, she made it
impossible for you to pity her.

It is this superb attitude to life, this independence of the material
event, this detachment from the stream of circumstance, that marks her
from her sister; for Charlotte is at moments pitifully immersed in the
stream of circumstance, pitifully dependent on the material event. It
is true that she kept her head above the stream, and that the failure of
the material event did not frustrate or hinder her ultimate achievement.
But Charlotte's was not by any means "a chainless soul". It struggled
and hankered after the unattainable. What she attained and realized she
realized and attained in her imagination only. She knew nothing of the
soul's more secret and intimate possession. And even her imagination
waited to some extent upon experience. When Charlotte wrote of passion,
of its tragic suffering, or of its ultimate appeasing, she, after all,
wrote of things that might have happened to her. But when Emily wrote of
passion, she wrote of a thing that, so far as she personally was
concerned, not only was not and had not been, but never could be. It was
true enough of Charlotte that she created. But of Emily it was
absolutely and supremely true.

Hers is not the language of frustration, but of complete and satisfying
possession. It may seem marvellous in the mouth of a woman destitute of
all emotional experience, in the restricted sense; but the real wonder
would have been a _Wuthering Heights_ born of any personal emotion; so
certain is it that it was through her personal destitution that her
genius was so virile and so rich. At its hour it found her virgin, not
only to passion but to the bare idea of passion, to the inner and
immaterial event.

And her genius was great, not only through her stupendous imagination,
but because it fed on the still more withdrawn and secret sources of her
soul. If she had had no genius she would yet be great because of what
took place within her, the fusion of her soul with the transcendent and
enduring life.

It was there that, possessing nothing, she possessed all things; and her
secret escapes you if you are aware only of her splendid paganism. She