their place side by side with creators. The
destroyers of human thoughts are the winged ministers of the
thoughts of Nature. Out of the graves of ideals something rises
which is beyond any ideal. We are tossed to and fro, poets and men
of action alike, by powers whose intentions are dark, by unknown
forces whose faces no man may ever see. From darkness to darkness
we stagger across a twilight-stage.

With no beginning that we can imagine, with no end that we can
conceive, the mad procession moves forward. Only sometimes, at
moments far, far apart, and in strange places, do we seem to catch
the emergence, out of the storm in which we struggle, of something
that no poet nor artist nor any other human voice has ever uttered,
something that is as far beyond our virtue as it is beyond our evil,
something terrible, beautiful, irrational, _mad_--which is the secret
of the universe!

EMILY BRONTE

The name of Emily Bronte--why does it produce in one's mind so
strange and startling a feeling, unlike that produced by any other
famous writer?

It is not easy to answer such a question. Certain great souls seem to
gather to themselves, as their work accumulates its destined
momentum in its voyage down the years, a power of arousing our
imagination to issues that seem larger than those which can naturally
be explained as proceeding inevitably from their tangible work.

Our imagination is roused and our deepest soul stirred by the
mention of such names without any palpable accompaniment of
logical analysis, without any well-weighed or rational justification.

Such names touch some response in us which goes deeper than our
critical faculties, however desperately they may struggle. Instinct
takes the place of reason; and our soul, as if answering the appeal of
some translunar chord of subliminal music, vibrates in response to a
mood that baffles all analysis.

We all know the work of Emily's sister Charlotte; we know it and
can return to it at will, fathoming easily and at leisure the fine
qualities of it and its impassioned and romantic effect upon us.

But though we may have read over and over again that one amazing
story--"Wuthering Heights"--and that handful of unforgettable
poems which are all that Emily Bronte has bequeathed to the world,
which of us can say that the full significance of these things has
been ransacked and combed out by our conscious reason; which of
us can say that we understand to the full all the