"The spirit inexorable to the flesh:" there is the whole secret of what in her life was her genius. Alone with herself--with her soul and her body--she allows herself no respite: for she was always of an unresting nature. So in the words of Pater--who told me of his enormous admiration for her prose--"we are all _condamnés à mort avec des sursis indéfinis_; we have our interval and then our place knows us no more." How she spent these "intervals" must be forever unknown. Not in high passions, I imagine, nor in wisdom, nor in care for material things; but in moods of passion, in intellectual excitement, in an inexhaustible curiosity, in an ironical contemplation "of the counted pulses of a variegated, dramatic life." But never, I am certain, was she ever capable--as she watches the weaving and unweaving of herself--of the base corruption of what his existence was to Beardsley. "That he should be so honest with his fear," I have written of him, "that he should sit down before its face and study it feature by feature: that he should never turn aside his eyes for more than one instant, make no attempt to escape, but sit at home with it, travel with it, see it in his mirror, taste it in the sacrament: that is the marvellous thing, and the sign of his fundamental sincerity in life and art." Emily Brontë's passionate and daring genius attains this utmost limit of tragedy, and with this a sense--an extreme sense--of the mystery of terror which lurks in all the highest poetry as certainly in her lyrical prose; a quality which distinguishes such prose and verse from all that is but a little lower than the highest. Her genius is somber in the sense that Webster's is, but much less dramatic. Neither his tragedies nor her novel are well-constructed; and in her case something is certainly lacking; for her narrative is dominated by sheer chance, and guided by mere accident. And I think that she, with her sleepless imagination, might have said as the child Giovanni in Webster's Tragedy says: "I have not slept these six nights. When do the dead walk?" and is answered: "When God shall please." When in disguise she sings of the useless rebellions of the earth, rarely has a more poignant cry been wrenched out of "a soul on the rack"--that is to say since Santa Teresa sang:-- A soul in God hidden from sin, What more desires for thee remain, Save but to love, and love again And, all on flame, with love within, Love on, and turn to love again? than this stanza: O! dreadful is the shock--intense the agony-- When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see; When the pulse begins to throb, the brain to think again, The soul to feel the flesh and the flesh to feel the chain.