the
passion they feel, when she pours forth the words, exaltation and
mystery of a love beside which all else seems pallid and casual. Where,
if not in her heart, has she heard the matchless words of the girl, who
speaks to her nurse of the man who is hated and harassed by all, but
whom she wholly adores? "My great miseries in this world have been
Heathcliff's miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning;
my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and HE
remained, _I_ should still continue to be; and if all else remained,
and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger;
I should not seem a part of it. My love for Linton is like the foliage
in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes
the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks
beneath--a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I AM
Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more
than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being. ... I do
not love him because he's handsome, but because he's more myself than I
am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same." ...

She has but little acquaintance with the external realities of love,
and these she handles so innocently at times as almost to provoke a
smile; but where can she have acquired her knowledge of those inner
realities, that are interwoven with all that is profoundest and most
illogical in passion, with all that is most unexpected, most
impossible, and most eternally true? We feel that one must have lived
for thirty years beneath burning chains of burning kisses to learn what
she has learned; to dare so confidently set forth, with such
minuteness, such unerring certainty, the delirium of those two
predestined lovers of "Wuthering Heights"; to mark the self-conflicting
movements of the tenderness that would make suffer and the cruelty that
would make glad, the felicity that prayed for death and the despair
that clung to life; the repulsion that desired, the desire drunk with
repulsion--love surcharged with hatred, hatred staggering beneath its
load of love. ...

And yet it is known to us--for in this poor life of hers all lies
open--that she neither loved nor was loved. May it be true then that
the last word of an existence is only a word that destiny whispers low
to what lies most hidden in our heart? Have we indeed an inner life
that yields not in reality to