ho would not then understand why it was
that she shed no tears, unlike so many of her sisters, who spend their
lives in plaintive wanderings from one broken joy to another? The joy
that is dead weighs heavy, and bids fair to crush us, if we cause it to
be with us for ever; which is as though a wood-cutter should refuse to
lay down his load of dead wood. For dead wood was not made to be
eternally borne on the shoulder, but indeed to be burned, and give
forth brilliant flame. And as we behold the names that soar aloft in
Emily's soul, then are we as heedless as she was of the sorrows of the
dead wood. No misfortune but has its horizon, no sadness but shall know
comfort, for the man who in the midst of his suffering, in the midst of
the grief that must come to him as to all, has learned to espy Nature's
ample gesture beneath all sorrow and suffering, and has become aware
that this gesture alone is real. "The sage, who is lord of his life,
can never truly be said to suffer." wrote an admirable woman, who had
known much sorrow herself. "It is from the heights above that he looks
down on his life, and if to-day he should seem to suffer, it is only
because he has allowed his thoughts to incline towards the less perfect
part of his soul." Emily Bronte not only breathes life into tenderness,
loyalty, and love, but into hatred and wickedness also; nay, into the
very fiercest revengeful ness, the most deliberate perfidy; nor does
she deem it incumbent upon her to pardon, for pardon implies only
incomplete comprehension. She sees, she admits, and she loves. She
admits the evil as well as the good, she gives life to both; well
knowing that evil, when all is said, is only righteousness strayed from
the path. She reveals to us--not with the moralist's arbitrary formula,
but as men and years reveal the truths we have wit to grasp--the final
helplessness of evil, brought face to face with life; the final
appeasement of all things in nature as well as in death, "which is only
the triumph of life over one of its specialised forms." She shows how
the dexterous lie, begotten of genius and strength, is forced to bow
down before the most ignorant, puniest truth; she shows the
self-deception of hatred that sows, all unwilling, the seeds of
gladness and love in the life that it anxiously schemes to destroy. She
is, perhaps, the first to base a plea for indulgence on the great law
of heredity; and when, at the end of her book, she goes to the vill