ead Emily Bronte anywhere without being
transported to those Yorkshire moors. One smells the smell of
burning furze, one tastes the resinous breath of pine-trees, one feels
beneath one's feet the tough fibrous stalks of the ling and the
resistant stems and crumpled leaves of the bracken.

Dark against that pallid greenish light of a dead sunset, which is
more than anything else characteristic of those unharvested fells,
one can perceive always, as one reads her, the sombre form of some
gigantic Scotch-fir stretching out its arms across the sky; while a
flight of rooks, like enormous black leaves drifting on the wind, sail
away into the sunset at our approach.

One is conscious, as one reads her, of lonely marsh-pools turning
empty faces towards a grey heaven, while drop by drop upon their
murky waters the autumn rain falls, sadly, wearily, without aim or
purpose.

And most of all is one made aware of the terrible desolation
--desolation only rendered more desolate by the presence of
humanity--of those half-ruined farm-houses, approached by windy
paths or deep-cut lanes, which seem to rise, like huge fungoid things,
here and there over that sad land.

It is difficult to conceive they have not sprung--these dwellings of
these Earnshaws and Lintons--actually out of the very soil, in slow
organic growth leading to slow organic decay. One cannot conceive
the human hands which _built_ them; any more than one can
conceive the human hands which planted those sombre hedges
which have now become so completely part of the scenery that one
thinks of them as quite as aboriginal to the place as the pine-trees or
the gorse-bushes.

Of all shapes of all trees I think the shape of an old and twisted
thorn-tree harmonises best with one's impression of the "milieu" of
Emily Bronte's single tragic story; a thorn-tree distorted by the wind
blowing from one particular quarter, and with its trunk blackened
and hollowed; and in the hollow of it a little pool of rain-water and a
few dead soaked leaves.

The extraordinary thing is that she can produce these impressions
incidentally, and, as it were, unconsciously. They are so blent with
her spirit, these things, that they convey themselves to one's mind
indirectly and through a medium far more subtle than any eloquent
description.

I cannot think of Emily Bronte's work without thinking of a certain
tree I once saw against a pallid sky. A long way from Yorkshire it
was where I saw this