na; here is a Chinese lady with a foot littler than mine.
There is a wild horse of Tartary; and here--most strange of all--is a
land of ice and snow without green fields, woods, or gardens. In this
land they found some mammoth bones; there are no mammoths now. You don't
know what it was; but I can tell you, because Graham told me. A mighty
goblin creature, as high as this room, and as long as the hall; but not
a fierce, flesh-eating thing, Graham thinks. He believes if I met one in
a forest, it would not kill me, unless I came quite in its way; when it
would trample me down amongst the bushes, as I might tread on a
grasshopper in a hay-field without knowing it.'"

It is Polly's Imagination that appears again in Lucy's "Creative
Impulse". "I with whom that Impulse was the most intractable, the most
capricious, the most maddening of masters ... a deity which sometimes,
under circumstances apparently propitious, would not speak when
questioned, would not hear when appealed to, would not, when sought, be
found; but would stand, all cold, all indurated, all granite, a dark
Baal with carven lips and blank eyeballs, and breast like the stone face
of a tomb; and again, suddenly, at some turn, some sound, some
long-trembling sob of the wind, at some rushing past of an unseen stream
of electricity, the irrational Demon would awake unsolicited, would stir
strangely alive, would rush from its pedestal like a perturbed Dagon,
calling to its votary for a sacrifice, whatever the hour--to its victim
for some blood or some breath, whatever the circumstances or
scene--rousing its priest, treacherously promising vaticination,
perhaps filling its temple with a strange hum of oracles, but sure to
give half the significance to fateful winds, and grudging to the
desperate listener even a miserable remnant--yielding it sordidly, as
though each word had been a drop of the deathless ichor of its own dark
veins."

That is Lucy. But when Polly reappears fitfully as Pauline de
Bassompierre, she is an ordinary, fastidious little lady without a spark
of imagination or of passion.

Now in the first three chapters of _Villette_, Charlotte Bronte
concentrated all her strength and all her art on the portrait of little
Polly. The portrait of little Polly is drawn with the most delicate care
and tender comprehension, and the most vivid and entire reality. I
cannot agree with Mr. Swinburne that George Eliot, with her Totty and
Eppie and Lillo, showed a c