inspired intelligence and creative instinct to succeed in making us feel, that the main-spring of all, the central relation of the whole, “the very pulse of the machine,” has in it this occult inexplicable force of nature. But when Catherine Earnshaw says to Nelly Dean, “I _am_ Heathcliff!” and when Jane Eyre answers Edward Rochester’s question, whether she feels in him the absolute sense of fitness and correspondence to herself which he feels himself in her, with the words which close and crown the history of their twin-born spirits--“to the finest fibre of my nature, sir,”--we feel to the finest fibre of our own that these are no mere words. On this ground at least it might for once be not unpardonable to borrow their standing reference or illustration from the comparative school of critics, ... and say, as was said on another score of Emily Brontë in particular by Sydney Dobell, that either sister in this single point “has done no less” than Shakespeare. As easily might we imagine a change of the mutual relations between the characters of Shakespeare as a corresponding revolution or reversal of conditions among theirs. [Sidenote: Emily a true poet.] There was a dark unconscious instinct as of primitive nature-worship in the passionate great genius of Emily Brontë, which found no corresponding quality in her sister’s.... It is possible that to take full delight in Emily Brontë’s book one must have something by natural inheritance of her instinct and something by earliest association of her love for the same special points of earth--the same lights and sounds and colors and odors, and sights and shapes of the same fierce free landscape of tenantless and fenceless moor; but however that may be, it was assuredly with no less justice of insight and accuracy of judgment than humility of self-knowledge and fidelity of love that Charlotte in her day of solitary fame assigned to her dead sister the crown of poetic honor which she has rightfully disclaimed for herself. Full of poetic quality as her own work is throughout, that quality is never condensed or crystallised into the proper and final form of verse. But the pure note of absolutely right expression for things inexpressible in full by prose at its highest point of adequacy--the formal inspiration of sound which at once reveals itself, and which can fully reveal itself by metrical embodiment alone, in the symphonies and antiphonies of regular word-music and definite instinctive modulation of corresponsive tones--this is what Emily had for her birthright as certainly as Charlotte had it not.... The final expression in verse of Emily’s passionate and inspired intelligence was to be uttered from lips already whitened though not yet chilled by the present shadow of unterrifying death. No last words of poet or hero or sage or saint were ever worthy of longer or more reverent remembrance than that appeal which is so far above and beyond a prayer ... at once fiery and