all be sorry for
_you_. I shall be incomparably above and beyond you all.'"

True, adoration of Earth, the All-Mother, runs like a choric hymn
through all the tragedy. Earth is the mother and the nurse of these
children. They are brought to her for their last bed, and she gives them
the final consolation.

Yet, after all, the end of this wild northern tragedy is far enough from
Earth, the All-Mother. The tumult of _Wuthering Heights_ ceases when
Heathcliff sickens. It sinks suddenly into the peace and silence of
exhaustion. And the drama closes, not in hopeless gloom, the agony of
damned souls, but in redemption, reconciliation.

Catherine, the child of Catherine and of Edgar Linton, loves Hareton,
the child of Hindley Earnshaw. The evil spirit that possessed these two
dies with the death of Heathcliff. The younger Catherine is a mixed
creature, half-spiritualized by much suffering. Hareton is a splendid
animal, unspiritualized and unredeemed. Catherine redeems him; and you
gather that by that act of redemption, somehow, the souls of Catherine
and Heathcliff are appeased.

The whole tremendous art of the book is in this wringing of strange and
terrible harmony out of raging discord. It ends on a sliding cadence,
soft as a sigh of peace only just conscious after pain.

"I sought, and soon discovered, the three headstones on the slope next
the moor: the middle one grey and half-buried in heath; Edgar Linton's
only harmonized by the turf and moss creeping up its foot; Heathcliff's
still bare.

"I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths
fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind
breathing through the grass, and wondered how anyone could ever imagine
unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth."

* * * * *

But that is not the real end, any more than Lockwood's arrival at
Wuthering Heights is the beginning. It is only Lockwood recovering
himself; the natural man's drawing breath after the passing of the
supernatural.

For it was not conceivable that the more than human love of Heathcliff
and Catherine should cease with the dissolution of their bodies. It was
not conceivable that Catherine, by merely dying in the fifteenth
chapter, should pass out of the tale. As a matter of fact, she never
does pass out of it. She is more in it than ever.

For the greater action of the tragedy is entirely on the invisible and
immaterial plane