f lust and voluptuousness. But Emily Bronte seems to
dwell by natural predilection upon these high summits and in these
unsounded depths. The flame of the passion in her burns at such
quivering vibrant pressure that the fuel of it--the debris and rubble of
our earth-instincts--is entirely absorbed and devoured. In her work
the fire of life licks up, with its consuming tongue, every vestige of
materiality in the thing upon which it feeds, and the lofty tremulous
spires of its radiant burning ascend into the illimitable void.

It is of extraordinary interest, as a mere psychological phenomenon,
to note the fact that when the passion of sex is driven forward by the
flame of its conquering impulse beyond a certain point it becomes
itself transmuted and loses the earthy texture of its original character.

Sex-passion when carried to a certain pitch of intensity loses its
sexuality. It becomes pure flame; immaterial, unearthly, and with no
sensual dross left in it.

It may even be said, by an enormous paradox, to become sexless.
And this is precisely what one feels about the work of Emily Bronte.
Sex-passion in her has been driven so far that it has come round "full
circle" and has become sexless passion. It has become passion
disembodied, passion absolute, passion divested of all human
weakness. The "muddy vesture of decay" which "grossly closes in"
our diviner principle has been burnt up and absorbed. It has been
reduced to nothing; and in its place quivers up to heaven the clear
white flame of the secret fountain of life.

But there is more in the matter than that. Emily Bronte's genius, by
its abandonment to the passion of which I have been speaking, does
not only burn up and destroy all the elements of clay in what, so to
speak, is above the earth and on its surface; but it also, burning
downwards, destroys and annihilates all dubious and obscure
materials which surround the original and primordial human will.
Round and about this lonely and inalienable will it makes a scorched
and blackened plain of ashes and cinders. Ambiguous feelings are
turned to ashes there; and so are doubts, hesitations, timidities,
trepidations, cowardices. The aboriginal will of man, of the
unconquerable individual, stands alone there in the twilight, under
the grey desolate rain of the outer spaces. Four-square it stands,
upon adamantine foundations, and nothing in heaven or earth is able
to shake it or disquiet it.

It is this isolation