her cyclone, of passion; the cyclone that rages in the hearts of
Heathcliff and of Catherine. The genius of Emily Bronte was so far
dramatic that, if you could divide her poems into the personal and
impersonal, the impersonal would be found in a mass out of all
proportion to the other. But, with very few exceptions, you cannot so
divide them; for in her continuous and sustaining dream, the vision that
lasted for at least eleven years of her life, from eighteen-thirty-four,
the earliest date of any known Gondal poem, to eighteen-forty-five, the
last appearance of the legend, she _was_ these people; she lived,
indistinguishably and interchangeably, their tumultuous and passionate
life. Sometimes she is the lonely spirit that looks on in immortal
irony, raised above good and evil. More often she is a happy god,
immanent in his restless and manifold creations, rejoicing in this
multiplication of himself. It is she who fights and rides, who loves and
hates, and suffers and defies. She heads one poem naively: "To the Horse
Black Eagle that I rode at the Battle of Zamorna." The horse _I_ rode!
If it were not glorious, it would be (when you think what her life was
in that Parsonage) most mortally pathetic.

But it is all in keeping. For, as she could dare the heavenly, divine
adventure, so there was no wild and ardent adventure of the earth she
did not claim.

* * * * *

Love of life and passionate adoration of the earth, adoration and
passion fiercer than any pagan knew, burns in _Wuthering Heights_. And
if that were all, it would be impossible to say whether her mysticism or
her paganism most revealed the soul of Emily Bronte.

In _Wuthering Heights_ we are plunged apparently into a world of most
unspiritual lusts and hates and cruelties; into the very darkness and
thickness of elemental matter; a world that would be chaos, but for the
iron Necessity that brings its own terrible order, its own implacable
law of lust upon lust begotten, hate upon hate, and cruelty upon
cruelty, through the generations of Heathcliffs and of Earnshaws.

Hindley Earnshaw is brutal to the foundling, Heathcliff, and degrades
him. Heathcliff, when his hour comes, pays back his wrong with the
interest due. He is brutal beyond brutality to Hindley Earnshaw, and he
degrades Hareton, Hindley's son, as he himself was degraded; but he is
not brutal to him. The frustrated passion of Catherine Earnshaw for
Heathcliff, and