mysterious stir and
ferment, all the far-reaching and magical reactions, which such
things have produced within us?

Who can put into words the secret of this extraordinary girl? Who
can define, in the suave and plausible language of academic culture,
the flitting shadows thrown from deep to deep in the unfathomable
genius of her vision?

Perhaps not since Sappho has there been such a person. Certainly
she makes the ghosts of de Stael and Georges Sand, of Eliot and Mrs.
Browning, look singularly homely and sentimental.

I am inclined to think that the huge mystery of Emily Bronte's power
lies in the fact that she expresses in her work--just as the Lesbian,
did--the very soul of womanhood. It is not an easy thing to achieve,
this. Women writers, clever and lively and subtle, abound in our
time, as they have abounded in times past; but for some inscrutable
reason they lack the demonic energy, the occult spiritual force, the
instinctive fire, wherewith to give expression to the ultimate mystery
of their own sex.

I am inclined to think that, of all poets, Walt Whitman is the only
one who has drawn his reckless and chaotic inspiration straight from
the uttermost spiritual depths of the sex-instincts of the male animal;
and Emily Bronte has done for her sex what Walt Whitman did for
his.

It is a strange and startling commentary upon the real significance of
our sexual impulses that, when it comes to the final issue, it is not
the beautiful ruffianism of a Byron, full of normal sex-instinct
though that may be, or the eloquent sentiment of a Georges Sand,
penetrated with passionate sensuality as that is, which really touch
the indefinable secret. Emily Bronte, like Walt Whitman, sweeps us,
by sheer force of inspired genius, into a realm where the mere
_animalism_ of sexuality, its voluptuousness, its lust, its lechery, are
absolutely merged, lost, forgotten; fused by that burning flame of
spiritual passion into something which is beyond all earthly desire.

Emily Bronte--and this is indicative of the difference between
woman and man--goes even further than Walt Whitman in the
spiritualising of this flame. In Whitman there is, as we all know, a
vast mass of work, wherein, true and magical though it is, the
earthly and bodily elements of the great passion are given enormous
emphasis. It is only at rare moments--as happens with ordinary men
in the normal experience of the world--that he is swept away beyond
the reach o