o the moment when, with a howl like a
madman, Heathcliff drags her from her grave, their affiliation is
desperate and absolute.

This is a love which passes far beyond all sensuality, far beyond all
voluptuous pleasure. They get little good of their love, these
two--little solace and small comfort.

But one cannot conceive their wishing to change their lot with any
happier lovers. They are what they are, and they are prepared to
endure what fate shall send them.

When Cathy admits to the old servant that she intends to marry
Linton because Heathcliff was unworthy of her and would drag her
down, "I love Linton," she says--"but _I am_ Heathcliff!" And this
_"I am_ Heathcliff" rings in our ears as the final challenge to a
chaotic pluralistic world full of cynical disillusionment, of the
desperate spirit of which Emily Bronte was made.

The wild madness of such love--passing the love of men and
women--may seem to many readers the mere folly of an insane
dream.

Emily Bronte--as she was bound to do--tosses them forth, that
inhuman pair, upon the voyaging homeless wind; tosses them forth,
free of their desperation, to wander at large, ghosts of their own
undying passions, over the face of the rainswept moors. But to most
quiet and sceptical souls such an issue of the drama contradicts the
laws of nature. To most patient slaves of destiny the end of the ashes
of these fierce flames is to mingle placidly with the dark earth of
those misty hills and find their release in nothing more tragic than
the giving to the roots of the heather and the bracken a richer soil
wherein to grow.

None of us know! None of us can ever know! It is enough that in
this extraordinary story the wild strange link which once and again
in the history of a generation binds so strangely two persons together,
almost as though their association were the result of some aeon-old
everlasting Recurrence, is once more thrown into tragic relief and
given the tender beauty of an austere imagination.

Not every one can feel the spell of Emily Bronte or care for her
work. To some she must always remain too ungracious, too savage,
too uncompromising. But for those who have come to care for her,
she is a wonderful and a lovely figure; a figure whose full
significance has not even yet been sounded, a figure with whom we
must come more and more to associate that liberation of what we
call love from the mere animalism of sexual passion, which we feel
sometimes,