Her lesser work, therefore, is plain narrative, and her
greater work is no more. On the hither side--the daily side--of imagery
she is still a strong and solitary writer; on the yonder side she has
written some of the most mysterious passages in all plain prose. And
with what direct and incommunicable art! "'Let me alone, let me alone,'
said Catherine. 'If I've done wrong, I'm dying for it. You left me too
. . . I forgive you. Forgive me!' 'It is hard to forgive, and to look
at those eyes and feel those wasted hands,' he answered. 'Kiss me again,
and don't let me see your eyes! I forgive what you have done to me. I
love my murderer--but _yours_! How can I?' They were silent, their
faces hid against each other, and washed by each other's tears." "So
much the worse for me that I am strong," cries Heathcliff in the same
scene. "Do I want to live? What kind of living will it be when you--Oh
God, would you like to live with your soul in the grave?"
Charlotte Bronte's noblest passages are her own speech or the speech of
one like herself acting the central part in the dreams and dramas of
emotion that she had kept from her girlhood--the unavowed custom of the
ordinary girl by her so splendidly avowed in a confidence that comprised
the world. Emily had no such confessions to publish. She contrived--but
the word does not befit her singular spirit of liberty, that knew nothing
of stealth--to remove herself from the world; as her person left no pen-
portrait, so her "I" is not heard here.
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