tree, and there were no limestone boulders
scattered at its feet; but something in the impression it produced
upon me--an impression I shall not lightly forget--weaves itself
strangely in with all I feel about her, so that the peculiar look of
wintry boughs, sad and silent against a fading west, accompanied by
that natural human longing of people who are tired to be safely
buried under the friendly earth and "free among the dead," has come
to be most indelibly and deeply associated with her tragic figure.

Those who know those Yorkshire moors know the mysterious way
in which the quiet country lanes suddenly emerge upon wide and
desolate expanses; know how they lead us on, past ruined factories
and deserted quarries, up the barren slopes of forlorn hills; know
how, as one sees in front of one the long white road vanishing over
the hill-top and losing itself in the grey sky, there comes across one's
mind a strange, sad, exquisite feeling unlike any other feeling in the
world; and we who love Emily Bronte know that this is the feeling,
the mood, the atmosphere of the soul, into which her writings throw
us.

The power of her great single story, "Wuthering Heights," is in a
primary sense the power of romance, and none can care for this
book for whom romance means nothing.

What is romance? I think it is the instinctive recognition of a certain
poetic glamour which an especial kind of grouping of persons and
things--of persons and things seen under a particular light--is able to
produce. It does not always accompany the expression of passionate
emotion or the narration of thrilling incidents. These may arrest and
entertain us when there is no romance, in my sense at any rate of
that great word, overshadowing the picture.

I think this quality of romance can only be evoked when the
background of the story is heavily laden with old, rich, dim, pathetic,
human associations. I think it can only emerge when there is an
implication of thickly mingled traditions, full of sombre and terrible
and beautiful suggestiveness, stimulating to the imagination like a
draught of heavy red wine. I think there must be, in a story of which
the flavour has the true romantic magic, something darkly and
inexplicably fatal. I think it is necessary that one should hear the
rush of the flight of the Valkyries and the wailing upon the wind of
the voices of the Eumenides.

Fate--in such a story--must assume a half-human, half-personal
shape, and