ble brother, for
whom she has expressed in two of her poems a more than masculine
magnanimity of pity and contempt; and that at all times she could turn
inward to that world within, where her imagination waited for her,

Where thou, and I, and Liberty
Have undisputed sovereignty.

Yet even imagination, though 'benignant,' is to her a form of 'phantom
bliss' to which she will not trust herself wholly. 'So hopeless is the
world without': but is the world within ever quite frankly accepted as a
substitute, as a truer reality? She is always on her guard against
imagination as against the outer world, whose 'lies' she is resolved
shall not 'beguile' her. She has accepted reason as the final arbiter,
and desires only to see clearly, to see things as they are. She really
believed that

Earth reserves no blessing
For the unblest of heaven;

and she had an almost Calvinistic sense of her own condemnation to
unhappiness. That being so, she was suspicious of those opportunities of
joy which did come to her, or at least resolute not to believe too
implicitly in the good messages of the stars, which might be mere
dreams, or of the earth, which was only certainly kind in preparing for
her that often-thought-of grave. 'No coward soul is mine' is one of her
true sayings; but it was with difficulty that she trusted even that
message of life which she seemed to discover in death. She has to assure
herself of it, again and again: 'Who once lives, never dies!' And that
sense of personal identity which aches throughout all her poems is a
sense, not of the delight, but of the pain and ineradicable sting of
personal identity.

Her poems are all outcries, as her great novel, _Wuthering Heights_, is
one long outcry. A soul on the rack seems to make itself heard at
moments, when suffering has grown too acute for silence. Every poem is
as if torn from her. Even when she does not write seemingly in her own
person, the subjects are such disguises as 'The Prisoner,' 'Honour's
Martyr,' 'The Outcast Mother,' echoes of all the miseries and useless
rebellions of the earth. She spells over the fading characters in dying
faces, unflinchingly, with an austere curiosity; and looks closely into
the eyes of shame, not dreading what she may find there. She is always
arguing with herself, and the answers are inflexible, the answers of a
clear intellect which rebels but accepts defeat. Her doubt is itself an
affirmation, her de