and regardless of the material event. She shows the
emptiness, the impotence, the insignificance of all that we call
"experience," beside the spirit that endures. "Not a single event ever
paused as it passed by her threshold; yet did every event she could
claim take place in her heart, with incomparable force and beauty, with
matchless precision and detail. We say that nothing ever happened; but
did not all things really happen to her much more directly and tangibly
than with most of us, seeing that everything that took place about her,
everything that she saw or heard was transformed within her into
thoughts and feelings, into indulgent love, admiration, adoration of
life...?

"Of her happiness none can doubt. Not in the soul of the best of all
those whose happiness has lasted longest, been the most active,
diversified, perfect, could more imperishable harvest be found, than in
the soul Emily Bronte lays bare. If to her there came nothing of all
that passes in love, sorrow, passion or anguish, still did she possess
all that abides when emotion has faded away."[A]

[Footnote A: _Wisdom and Destiny_, translated by Alfred Sutro.]

What was true of Charlotte, that her inner life was luminous with
intense realization, was a hundred times more true of Emily. It was so
true that beside it nothing else that can be said is altogether true. It
is not necessary for a man to be convinced of the illusory nature of
time and of material happenings in order to appreciate Charlotte's
genius; but his comprehension of Emily's will be adequate or otherwise,
according to the passion and sincerity with which he embraces that idea.
And he must have, further, a sense of the reality behind the illusion.
It is through her undying sense of it that Emily Bronte is great. She
had none of the proud appearances of the metaphysical mind; she did not,
so far as we know, devour, like George Eliot, whole systems of
philosophy in her early youth. Her passionate pantheism was not derived;
it was established in her own soul. She was a mystic, not by religious
vocation, but by temperament and by ultimate vision. She offers the
apparent anomaly of extreme detachment and of an unconquerable love of
life.

It was the highest and the purest passion that you can well conceive.
For life gave her nothing in return. It treated her worse than it
treated Charlotte. She had none of the things that, after all, Charlotte
had; neither praise nor fame in her lifetime