the outer life; that is no less
susceptible of experience and impression? Can we live, it matters not
where, and love, and hate, listening for no footfall, spurning no
creature? Is the soul self-sufficient; and is it always the soul that
decides, a certain height once gained? Is it only to those whose
conscience still slumbers that events can seem sad or sterile? Did not
love and beauty, happiness and adventure--did not all that we go in
search of along the ways of life congregate in Emily Bronte's heart?
Day after day passed by, with never a joy or emotion; never a smile
that the eye could see or the hand could touch; wherefore none the less
did her destiny find its fulfilment, for the confidence within her, the
eagerness, hope, animation, all were astir; and her heart was flooded
with light, and radiant with silent gladness. Of her happiness none can
doubt. Not in the soul of the best of all those whose happiness has
lasted the longest, been the most active, diversified, perfect, could
more imperishable harvest be found than in the soul Emily Bronte lays
bare. If to her there came nothing of all that passes in joy and in
love, in sorrow, passion, and anguish, still did she possess all that
abides when emotion has faded away. Which of the two will know more of
the marvellous palace--the blind man who lives there, or the other,
with wide-open eyes, who perhaps only enters it once? "To live, not to
live"--we must not let mere words mislead us. It is surely possible to
live without thought, but not to think, without active life. The
essence of the joy or sorrow the event contains lies in the idea the
event gives birth to: our own idea, if we are strong; that of others,
if we are weak. On your way to the grave there may come a thousand
external events towards you, whereof not one, it may be, shall find
within you the force that it needs to turn to moral event. Then may you
truthfully say, and then only, "I have perhaps not lived." The intimate
happiness of our heroine, as of every human being, was in exact
proportion to her morality and her sense of the universe; and these
indeed are the clearings in the forest of accidents whose area it is
well we should know when we seek to measure the happiness a life has
experienced. Who that had gained the altitude of peace and
comprehension whereon her soul reposed would still be wrought to
feeble, bitter, unrefreshing tears by the cares and troubles and
deceptions of ordinary life? W