aged to
achieve a triumphant artistic success; and to leave an impression of
serene wisdom such as no other woman writer has equaled or approached.

62. EMILY BRONTE. WUETHERING HEIGHTS.

Of all the books of all the Brontes, this one is the supreme
masterpiece. Charlotte has genius and imagination. She has passion
too. But there is a certain demonic violence about Emily which carries
her work into a region of high and desperate beauty forbidden to the
gentler spirit of her sister. The love of Heathcliff and Catherine
breaks the bonds of ordinary sensual or sentimental relationship and
hurls itself into that darker, stranger, more unearthly air, wherein
one hears the voices of the great lovers; and where Sappho and
Michaelangelo and Swift and Shelley and Nietzsche gasp forth their
imprecations and their terrible ecstasies. Crude and rough and jagged
and pitiless, the style of this astounding book seems to rend and
tear, like a broken saw, at the very roots of existence. In some
curious way, as in Balzac and Dostoievsky, emotions and situations
which have the tone and mood of quite gross melodrama are so driven
inwards by sheer diabolical intensity, that they touch the granite
substratum of what is eternal in human passion. The smell of
rain-drenched moors, the crying of the wind in the Scotch firs, the
long lines of black rooks drifting across the twilight,--these things
become, in the savage style of this extraordinary girl, the very
symbols and tokens of the power that rends her spirit.

63. GEORGE MEREDITH. HARRY RICHMOND.

"Harry Richmond" is at once the least Meredithian and the best of all
Meredith's books. Meredith, though to a much less degree than George
Eliot, is one of those pseudo-philosophic, pseudo-ethical writers, who
influence a generation or two and then stem to become antiquated and
faded.

It is when he is least philosophical and least moralistic--as in the
superbly imaginative figure of Richmond Roy--that he is at his
greatest. There is, throughout his work, an unpleasing strain, like
the vibration of a rope drawn out too tight,--a strain and a tug of
intellectual intensity, that is not fulfilled by any corresponding
intellectual wisdom. His descriptions of nature, in his poems, as well
as in his prose works, have an original vigor and a pungent tang of
their own; but the twisted violence of their introduction, full of
queer jolts and jerks, prevents their impressing one with any sense o