travail. On the neck lay a pale reflection like moonlight; the same faint lustre touched the train of thin clouds from which rose and bowed the vision of the Evening Star.

The third showed the pinnacle of an iceberg piercing a polar winter sky: a muster of northern lights reared their dim lances, close serried, along the horizon. Throwing these into distance, rose, in the foreground, a head, a colossal head, inclined towards the iceberg, and resting against it. Two thin hands, joined under the forehead, and supporting it, drew up before the lower features a sable veil ; a brow quite bloodless, white as bone, and an eye hollow and fixed, blank of meaning but for the glassiness of despair, alone were visible. Above the temples, amidst wreathed turban folds of black drapery, vague in its character and consistency as cloud, gleamed a ring of white flame, gemmed with sparkles of a more lurid tinge. This pale crescent was "the likeness of a Kingly Crown; what it diademed was "the shape which shape had none."

On that magnificent night of the fête, when Mme. Beck endeavored, through the operation of a sedative, to hold her English teacher in subjection, the drug merely excited her.

Instead of stupor came excitement. I became alive to new thought to reverie peculiar in coloring. A gathering call ran among the faculties, their bugles sang, their trumpets rang an untimely summons. Imagination was roused from her rest, and she came forth impetuous and venturous. With scorn she looked on Matter, her mate. "Rise!" she said. "Sluggard this night I will have my will; nor shalt thou prevail."

"Look forth and view the night!" was her cry, and when I lifted the heavy blind from the casement close at hand with her own royal gesture, she showed me a moon supreme, in an element deep and splendid.

To my gasping senses she made the glimmering gloom, the narrow limits, the oppressive heat of the dormitory, intolerable. She lured me to leave this den and follow her forth into dew, coolness, and glory.

She recalls having seen a gap in the paling of the park fence. She determines that she will try thus to steal into this deserted park, where she will be absolutely alone at such an hour. "The whole park would be mine, the moonlight, midnight park!" She does not find it deserted, as we know; but after all the fever and the glamour of the fête had passed, as Lucy seeks again the "dim lower quarter," she finds the moon of her search.

Dim I should not say, for the beauty of moonlight, forgotten in the park, here once more flowed in upon perception. High she rode, and calm and stainlessly she shone. The music and the mirth of the fête, the fire and bright hues of those lamps had outdone and outshone her for an hour, but now, again, her glory and her silence triumphed. The rival lamps were dying: she held her course like a white fate. Drum, trumpet, bugle, had uttered their clangor and were forgotten: with pencil-ray she wrote on heaven and earth records for archives everlasting. She and those stars seemed to me at once the types and witnesses of truth all regnant. The night-sky lit her reign: like its slowwheeling progress, advanced her victory, that onward movement which has been, and is, and will be from eternity to eternity.

Paul Emmanuel, lingering in the garden, looks "at the moon, at the gray cathedral over the remoter spires and house roofs fading into a blue sea of night-mist. He tasted the sweet breath of dusk, and noted the folded bloom of the garden." Who

else has so delicately expressed that exquisite sense of perfumed eventide, that unnamable sacred-human presence of the haunting vesper spirit?

Her finest similes are based on nature. Saint Pierre's power over her unruly pupils held "them in check as a breezeless frost-air might still a brawling stream." The fair visitors at Thornfield-Hall descend the staircase "almost as noiselessly as a bright mist rolls down a hill." These fine ladies "all had a sweeping amplitude of array that seemed to magnify their persons as a mist magnifies the moon." It is not every day that one may read in one book two such similes based on the effects of mist. When the Orders in Council were repealed, "Liverpool started and snorted like a river-horse roused amongst his reeds by thunder."

So, too, the adjectives which come at her nod have the fine fitness which nature demands, the fitness which makes one cry out, "None other would have done at all!" The rain falls "heavy, prone, and broad." The beck sends a "raving" sound through the air. She has twice put into living words the swelling emotions all travellers open to its influence must feel who stand below the great dome of St. Paul's in the solemn night time:

It, too, is dear to my soul; for there, as I lay in quiet and darkness, I first heard the great bell of St. Paul's telling London it was midnight; and well do I recall the deep deliberate tones, so full charged with colossal phlegm and force.

I had just extinguished my candle and lain down, when a deep, low, mighty tone swung through the night. At first I knew it not; but it was uttered twelve times, and at the twelfth colossal hum and trembling knell, I said, "I lie in

the shadow of St. Paul's." . . . Above my head, above the house-tops, co-elevate almost with the clouds, I saw a solemn orbed mass, dark-blue and dim- THE DOME. While I looked my inner self moved; my spirit shook its always fettered wings half loose; I had a sudden feeling as if I, who had never yet truly lived, were at last about to taste life; in that morning my soul grew as fast as Jonah's gourd.

This grave bass glides into softest treble when she writes, with equal insight, of "sweet, soft, exalted" sounds. Oh, carillons of Bruges!

III

In discussing Charlotte, one must speak of Emily also, that untamed virgin of the moors, to whom they were as the call of the sea to the mariner, and as strong drink to the drunkard. Younger in years and in grace, she was yet the elder sister in her attitude towards nature, as paganism is older than Christianity. With her, nature was the thing worshipped, not the milieu through which worship was done. It is expressed in Catherine's dream:

"If I were in heaven, Nelly, I should be extremely miserable."

"Because you are not fit to go there," I answered. sinners would be miserable in heaven."

"All

"But it is not for that. I dreamt once that I was there; .. heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights, where I woke sobbing for joy."

I shall have to show, in the next section, how she was like Charlotte, and yet greater than Charlotte, in her conception of love; but let me here point out, in passing, her place, along with her less terrible sister, among the great nature portrayers.

Emily Brontë has been called the Sphinx of literature. We have only Wuthering Heights' to tell us, in a mystery, what she was, that and a handful of poems, Charlotte's loving testimony, and this from 'Shirley':

A still, deep, inborn delight glows in her young veins; unmingled, untroubled, not to be reached or ravished by human agency, because by no human agency bestowed: the pure gift of God to his creature, the free dower of Nature to her child. This joy gives her experience of a genii-life. Buoyant, by green steps, by glad hills, all verdure and light, she reaches a station scarcely lower than that whence angels looked down on the dreamer of Beth-el, and her eye seeks, and her soul possesses, the vision of life as she wishes it. No, not as she wishes it: she has not time to wish the swift glory spreads out, sweeping and kindling, and multiplies its splendors faster than Thought can effect his combinations, faster than Aspiration can utter her longings.

...

If Shirley were not an indolent, a reckless, an ignorant being, she would take a pen at such moments; or at least while the recollection of such moments was yet fresh on her spirit: she would seize, she would fix the apparition, tell the vision revealed. Had she a little more of the organ of acquisitiveness in her head, a little more of the love of property in her nature, she would take a good-sized sheet of paper and write plainly out, in her own queer but clear and legible hand, the story that has been narrated, the song that has been sung to her, and thus possess what she was