has
the rare image, one of a terrifying little company of visions amid
terrifying facts: "His attention was roused, I saw, for his eyes rained
down tears among the ashes. . . The clouded windows of hell flashed for a
moment towards me; the fiend which usually looked out was so dimmed and
drowned." But in Heathcliff's own speech there is no veil or
circumstance. "I'm too happy; and yet I'm not happy enough. My soul's
bliss kills my body, but does not satisfy itself." "I have to remind
myself to breathe, and almost to remind my heart to beat." "Being alone,
and conscious two yards of loose earth was the sole barrier between us, I
said to myself: 'I'll have her in my arms again.' If she be cold, I'll
think it is this north wind that chills me; and if she be motionless, it
is sleep." What art, moreover, what knowledge, what a fresh ear for the
clash of repetition; what a chime in that phrase: "I dreamt I was
sleeping the last sleep by that sleeper, with my heart stopped, and my
cheek frozen against hers."

Emily Bronte was no student of books. It was not from among the fruits
of any other author's labour that she gathered these eminent words. But
I think I have found the suggestion of this action of Heathcliff's--the
disinterment. Not in any inspiring ancient Irish legend, as has been
suggested, did Emily Bronte find her incident; she found it (but she
made, and did not find, its beauty) in a mere costume romance of Bulwer
Lytton, whom Charlotte Bronte, as we know, did not admire. And Emily
showed no sign at all of admiration when she did him so much honour as to
borrow the action of his studio-bravo.

Heathcliff's love for Catherine's past childhood is one of the profound
surprises of this unparalleled book; it is to call her childish ghost--the
ghost of the little girl--when she has been a dead adult woman twenty
years that the inhuman lover opens the window of the house on the
Heights. Something is this that the reader knew not how to look for.
Another thing known to genius and beyond a reader's hope is the
tempestuous purity of those passions. This wild quality of purity has a
counterpart in the brief passages of nature that make the summers, the
waters, the woods, and the windy heights of that murderous story seem so
sweet. The "beck" that was audible beyond the hills after rain, the
"heath on the top of Wuthering Heights" whereon, in her dream of Heaven,
Catherine, flung out by angry angels, awoke sobb