ave the slow, tenacious, humorous, patient, imaginative instincts of
the country-born; or you have the smart, quick, clever, witty,
fanciful, lively, receptive, caustic turn of mind of those bred in the
great cities.

We all come to the town, "some in rags and some in jags and some
in velvet gowns"; but the country-born always recognises the
country-born, and there is a natural affinity between them.

I suspect that those who have behind them no local, provincial
traditions will find it difficult to understand Emily Bronte.

She did not deal in elaborate description; but the earth-mould smells
sweet, and the roots of the reeds of the pond-rushes show wavering
and dim in the dark water, and "through the hawthorn blows the cold
wind," and the white moon drifts over the sombre furze-covered
hills; and all these things have passed into her style and have formed
her style, and all these things are behind the tenacity with which she
endures life, and behind the immense mysterious hope with which,
while regarding all human creeds as "unutterably vain," she falls
back so fiercely upon that "amor intellectualis Dei" which is the
burning fire in her own soul.

--"Thou, thou art being and breath;
And what thou art can never be destroyed!"

JOSEPH CONRAD

The inherent genius of a writer is usually a deeper and more
ingrained thing than the obvious qualities for which the world
commends him, and this is true in a very profound sense in Conrad's
case.

We have only touched the fringe of the matter when we say that he
has possessed himself of the secret of the sea more completely than
any who write in English except Shakespeare and Swinburne.

We have only touched the fringe of the matter when we say he has
sounded the ambiguous stops of that mysterious instrument, the
heart of the white man exiled from his kind in the darkness of
tropical solitudes.

These things are of immense interest, but the essence of Conrad's
genius lies behind and beyond them; lies, in fact, if I am not
mistaken, in a region where he has hardly a single rival.

This region is nothing more nor less than that strange margin of our
minds, where memories gather which are deeper than memories, and
where emotions float by and waver and hover and alight, like wild
marsh-birds upon desolate sea-banks.

Conrad's genius, like the genius of all great writers who appeal to
what is common and universal in us, to what unites the clever and
the