certain tender flame; but you would be profoundly mistaken if
you argued from it more than the faintest polite interest in you and
your affairs. The kindling of Emily Bronte's eyes I take to have had at
times something of the same unearthly quality. Strangers received from
her an impression as of a creature utterly removed from them; a
remoteness scarcely human, hard to reconcile with her known tenderness
for every living thing. She seems to have had a passionate repugnance to
alien and external contacts, and to have felt no more than an almost
reluctant liking for the lovable and charming Ellen Nussey. Indeed, she
regarded Charlotte's friend with the large and virile tolerance that
refuses to be charmed.

And yet in the depths of her virginal nature there was something
fiercely tender and maternal. There can be no doubt that she cared for
Charlotte, who called her "Mine own bonnie love"; but she would seem to
have cared far more for Anne who was young and helpless, and for
Branwell who was helpless and most weak.

Thus there is absolutely nothing known of Emily that destroys or
disturbs the image that Haworth holds of her; nothing that detaches her
for a moment from her own people, and from her own place. Her days of
exile count not at all in her thirty years of home. No separation ever
broke, for one hour that counted, the bonds that bound her to her moors,
or frustrated the divine passion of her communion with their earth and
sky. Better still, no tale of passion such as they tell of Charlotte was
ever told of Emily.

It may be told yet, for no secret thing belonging to this disastrous
family is sacred. There may be somewhere some awful worshipper of Emily
Bronte, impatient of her silence and unsatisfied with her strange, her
virgin and inaccessible beauty, who will some day make up a story of
some love-affair, some passion kindred to Catherine Earnshaw's passion
for Heathcliff, of which her moors have kept the secret; and he will
tell his tale. But we shall at least know that he had made it up. And
even so, it will have been better for that man if he had never been
born. He will have done his best to destroy or to deface the loveliness
of a figure unique in literature. And he will have ignored the one
perfect, the one essentially true picture of Emily Bronte, which is to
be found in Maurice Maeterlinck's _Wisdom and Destiny_.

To M. Maeterlinck she is the supreme instance of the self-sufficing
soul, independent