If Byron can only thrill us with half-a-dozen little songs his glory-loving ghost ought to be quite content. To last in any form at all, as the generations pass and the face of the planet alters, is a great and lucky accident. To last so that men not only read you but love you when a century's dust covers your ashes is a high and royal privilege. To leave a name which, whether men read your work or not, whether men love your memory or not, still conjures up an image of strength and joy and courage and beauty, is a great reward. To leave a name which must be associated for all time with the human struggle to free itself from false idealism and false morality is something beyond any reward. It is to have entered into the creative forces of Nature herself. It is to have become a fatality. It is to have merged your human, individual, personal voice with the voices of _the elements which are beyond the elements._ It is to have become an eternally living portion of that unutterable central flame which, though the smoke of its burning may roll back upon us and darken our path, is forever recreating the world. Much of Byron's work, while he lived, was of necessity destructive. Such destruction is part of the secret of life. In the world of moral ideals destroyers have their place side by side with creators. The destroyers of human thoughts are the winged ministers of the thoughts of Nature. Out of the graves of ideals something rises which is beyond any ideal. We are tossed to and fro, poets and men of action alike, by powers whose intentions are dark, by unknown forces whose faces no man may ever see. From darkness to darkness we stagger across a twilight-stage. With no beginning that we can imagine, with no end that we can conceive, the mad procession moves forward. Only sometimes, at moments far, far apart, and in strange places, do we seem to catch the emergence, out of the storm in which we struggle, of something that no poet nor artist nor any other human voice has ever uttered, something that is as far beyond our virtue as it is beyond our evil, something terrible, beautiful, irrational, _mad_--which is the secret of the universe! EMILY BRONTË The name of Emily Brontë--why does it produce in one's mind so strange and startling a feeling, unlike that produced by any other famous writer? It is not easy to answer such a question. Certain great souls seem to gather to themselves, as their work accumulates its destined momentum in its voyage down the years, a power of arousing our imagination to issues that seem larger than those which can naturally be explained as proceeding inevitably from their tangible work. Our imagination is roused and our deepest soul stirred by the mention of such names without any palpable accompaniment of logical analysis, without any well-weighed or rational justification.