late of
an August evening, watching and being watched by a full harvest moon:
something is to rise white on the surface of the sea, over which that
moon mounts silent, and hangs glorious. . . I think I hear it cry with an
articulate voice. . . I show you an image fair as alabaster emerging from
the dim wave."

Charlotte Bronte knew well the experience of dreams. She seems to have
undergone the inevitable dream of mourners--the human dream of the
Labyrinth, shall I call it? the uncertain spiritual journey in search of
the waiting and sequestered dead, which is the obscure subject of the
"Eurydice" of Coventry Patmore's Odes. There is the lately dead, in
exile, remote, betrayed, foreign, indifferent, sad, forsaken by some
vague malice or neglect, sought by troubled love astray.

In Charlotte Bronte's page there is an autumnal and tempestuous dream. "A
nameless experience that had the hue, the mien, the terror, the very tone
of a visitation from eternity. . . Suffering brewed in temporal or
calculable measure tastes not as this suffering tasted." Finally, is
there any need to cite the passage of _Jane Eyre_ that contains the
avowal, the vigil in the garden? Those are not words to be forgotten.
Some tell you that a fine style will give you the memory of a scene and
not of the recording words that are the author's means. And others again
would have the phrase to be remembered foremost. Here, then, in _Jane_
_Eyre_, are both memories equal. The night is perceived, the phrase is
an experience; both have their place in the reader's irrevocable past.
"Custom intervened between me and what I naturally and inevitably loved."
"Jane, do you hear that nightingale singing in the wood?" "A waft of
wind came sweeping down the laurel walk, and trembled through the boughs
of the chestnut; it wandered away to an infinite distance. . . The
nightingale's voice was then the only voice of the hour; in listening I
again wept."

* * * * *

Whereas Charlotte Bronte walked, with exultation and enterprise, upon the
road of symbols, under the guidance of her own visiting genius, Emily
seldom went out upon those far avenues. She was one who practised
imagery sparingly. Her style had the key of an inner prose which seems
to leave imagery behind in the way of approaches--the apparelled and
arrayed approaches and ritual of literature--and so to go further and to
be admitted among simple realities and antitypes.

Charlotte Bronte also k