Page:Notes by the Way.djvu/392

 316 NOTES BY THE WAY.

resided almost constantly from birth till death. No one who looks on it, and remembers the monotonous gloom of the spot, can be surprised at their sadness, continual illness, and untimely death. They were peculiarly sensitive, self-conscious, and self-denying, and were trained with what must appear to ordinary readers to have been unusual severity. The parsonage, isolated from other houses, faces the church, and the windows look into the graveyard, which is literally paved with tombstones, although a few upright monuments break the uniformity and increase the dreary aspect of the scene. The wild moorland hills are immediately behind, and it was by them that the Brontes from infancy were fascinated. Emily (Ellis Bell) especially revelled in their sterile grandeur. She pined and sickened for them when removed to Brussels in early years. She loved them rapturously, for, to her eyes, they pos- sessed a beauty that no luxurious landscapes equalled .... The impetuous Emily seems to have been the especial darling of the household. Youngest of all, and dying so early, it is only by one work, ' Wuthering Heights,' and a few short poems, that we can estimate her genius. Yet what enormous power of delineation she displayed ! Her soul was attuned to the war of the elements : she loved the storm and wintry desolation ; the gloomy wastes, where the stranger's foot seldom pressed the moss, and where the few cottages frowned savagely on the crags that surrounded them. The ' becks ' or streams that rushed downwards to the valleys ; the long wail of the night wind, that seemed to whisper tales of wrong and misery, or strive for admittance at the ill-fastened doors and casements ; the shrill scream of some wild bird, and the splash of rain against the windows these were the sounds of music that delighted Emily Bronte. Stern and tyrannically exacting to herself, she permitted no decay of health to excuse her own omission of duties. Intense, persistent, and in defiance of all conventional timidity, were the labours which she imposed upon her fragile nature ; and this courageous intensity speaks in everything she wrote. Of all first works by a female, we consider her ' Wuthering Heights ' to be the most marvellous for power and originality. We desire no other such work from the hand of a woman. To be able to produce it presupposes an unhappy being, verging on death or insanity. Even while we read it we shudder, and re- member it always with a kind of fearful horror ; but we cannot withhold our tribute of admiration to its wondrously absorbing power. . . .A strange book for a girl to write, and for a girl to con- ceive as being possible to write, was ' Wuthering Heights.' Thought of the public seldom crossed her mind during its composition ; the three sisters laboured in secret, almost from each other.... With the general reading public Emily Bronte will always be less a favourite than her sister Charlotte, but by many, who form their judgment on private deliberation and by private intuition, there

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