hild; and I must open my lids to see. And so I opened and closed them a
hundred times a night--to be always disappointed! It racked me!... It
was a strange way of killing: not by inches, but by fractions of
hair-breadths, to beguile me with the spectre of a hope through eighteen
years!'"

In all Catherine's appearances you feel the impulse towards satisfaction
of a soul frustrated of its passion, avenging itself on the body that
betrayed it. It has killed Catherine's body. It will kill Heathcliff's;
for it _must_ get through to him. And he knows it.

Heathcliff's brutalities, his cruelties, the long-drawn accomplishment
of his revenge, are subordinate to this supreme inner drama, this
wearing down of the flesh by the lust of a remorseless spirit.

Here are the last scenes of the final act. Heathcliff is failing.
"'Nelly,' he says, 'there's a strange change approaching: I'm in its
shadow at present. I take so little interest in my daily life, that I
hardly remember to eat or drink. Those two who have left the room'"
(Catherine Linton and Hareton) "'are the only objects which retain a
distinct material appearance to me.... Five minutes ago, Hareton seemed
a personification of my youth, not a human being: I felt to him in such
a variety of ways that it would have been impossible to have accosted
him rationally. In the first place, his startling likeness to Catherine
connected him fearfully with her. That, however, which you may suppose
the most potent to arrest my imagination, is actually the least: for
what is not connected with her to me? and what does not recall her? I
cannot look down to this floor, but her features are shaped in the
flags? In every cloud, in every tree--filling the air at night, and
caught by glimpses in every object by day--I am devoured with her image!
The most ordinary faces of men and women--my own features--mock me with
a resemblance. The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda
that she did exist, and that I have lost her.'...

"'But what do you mean by a _change_, Mr. Heathcliff?' I said, alarmed
at his manner....

"'I shall not know till it comes,' he said, 'I'm only half conscious of
it now.'"

A few days pass. He grows more and more abstracted and detached. One
morning Nelly Dean finds him downstairs, risen late.

"I put a basin of coffee before him. He drew it nearer, and then rested
his arms on the table, and looked at the opposite wall, as I supposed,
surveying one parti