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204 as the executioner's strokes from a legendary martyr. He never learnt how secondary a place he held in his wife's heart, he never knew the misery of his only daughter—misery soon to be turned into joy. He lived and died, patient, happy, trustful, unvisited by the violence and fury that had their centre so near his hearth.

The younger Catharine and Hareton suffered but a temporary ill; the misery they endured together taught them to love; the tyrant's rod had blossomed into roses. And he, lonely and palsied at heart, eating out his soul in bitter solitude, he saw his plans of vengeance all frustrated, so much elaboration so simply counteracted; it was he that suffers. He suffered now: and Catharine Earnshaw who helped him to ruin by her desertion, and Hindley who perverted him by early oppression, they suffered at his hands. But not the sinless, the constant, the noble; misery, in the end, shifts its dull mists before the light of such clear spirits:

It is a poor conclusion, is it not?' said Heathcliff, 'an absurd termination to my violent exertions. I get levers and mattocks to demolish the two houses, and train myself to be capable of working like Hercules, and when everything is ready and in my power, I find the will to lift a slate off either roof has vanished.' "Five minutes ago Hareton seemed to be a personification of my youth, not a human being: I felt to him in such a variety of ways that it would have been impossible to have accosted him rationally. In the first place, his startling likeness to Catharine connected him fearfully with her. That, however, which you may suppose the most potent to arrest my imagination is in reality the