ith the long, bitter, tragic, human
associations of persons who have lived for generations upon the
same spot and have behind them the weight of the burden of the
sorrows of the dead.

It is a great book because the romance of it emerges into undisturbed
amplitude of space, and asserts itself in large, grand, primitive forms
unfretted by teasing irrelevancies.

The genius of a romantic novelist--indeed, the genius of all writers
primarily concerned with the mystery of human character--consists
in letting the basic differences between man and man, between man
and woman, rise up, unimpeded by frivolous detail, from the
fathomless depths of life itself.

The solitude in which Emily Bronte lived, and the austere simplicity
of her granite-moulded character, made it possible for her to
envisage life in larger, simpler, less blurred outlines than most of us
are able to do. Thus her art has something of that mysterious and
awe-inspiring simplicity that characterises the work of Michelangelo
or William Blake.

No one who has ever read "Wuthering Heights" can forget the place
and the time when he read it. As I write its name now, every reader
of this page will recall, with a sudden heavy sigh at the passing of
youth, the moment when the sweet tragic power of its deadly genius
first took him by the throat.

For me the shadow of an old bowed acacia-tree, held together by
iron bands, was over the history of Heathcliff; but the forms and
shapes of that mad drama gathered to themselves the lineaments of
all my wildest dreams.

I can well remember, too, how on a certain long straight road
between Heathfield and Burwash, the eastern district of Sussex, my
companion--the last of our English theologians--turned suddenly
from his exposition of St. Thomas, and began quoting, as the white
dust rose round us at the passing of a flock of sheep, the "vain are
the thousand creeds--unutterably vain!" of that grand and absolute
defiance, that last challenge of the unconquerable soul, which ends
with the sublime cry to the eternal spark of godhead in us all--

"Thou, thou art being and breath;
And what thou art can never be destroyed!"

The art of Emily Bronte--if it can be called art, this spontaneous
projection, in a shape rugged and savage, torn with the storms of
fate, of her inmost identity--can be appreciated best if we realise
with what skill we are plunged into the dark stream of the destiny of
these people through the