of love, has penetrated its most impenetrable secrets to such a degree, that those who have loved the most deeply must sometimes uneasily wonder what name they should give to the passion they feel, when she pours forth the words, exaltation and mystery of a love beside which all else seems pallid and casual.  Where, if not in her heart, has she heard the matchless words of the girl, who speaks to her nurse of the man who is hated and harassed by all, but whom she wholly adores?  “My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff’s miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning; my great thought in living is himself.  If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger; I should not seem a part of it.  My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods:  time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees.  My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath—­a source of little visible delight, but necessary.  Nelly, I am Heathcliff!  He’s always, always in my mind:  not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being. ...  I do not love him because he’s handsome, but because he’s more myself than I am.  Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” ...

She has but little acquaintance with the external realities of love, and these she handles so innocently at times as almost to provoke a smile; but where can she have acquired her knowledge of those inner realities, that are interwoven with all that is profoundest and most illogical in passion, with all that is most unexpected, most impossible, and most eternally true?  We feel that one must have lived for thirty years beneath burning chains of burning kisses to learn what she has learned; to dare so confidently set forth, with such minuteness, such unerring certainty, the delirium of those two predestined lovers of “Wuthering Heights”; to mark the self-conflicting movements of the tenderness that would make suffer and the cruelty that would make glad, the felicity that prayed for death and the despair that clung to life; the repulsion that desired, the desire drunk with repulsion—­love surcharged with hatred, hatred staggering beneath its load of love. ...

And yet it is known to us—­for in this poor life of hers all lies open—­that she neither loved nor was loved.  May it be true then that the last word of an existence is only a word that destiny whispers low to what lies most hidden in our heart?  Have we indeed an inner life that yields not in reality to the outer life; that is no less susceptible of experience and impression?  Can we live, it matters not where, and love, and hate, listening for no footfall, spurning no creature?  Is the soul self-sufficient; and is it always the soul that decides, a certain height once gained?  Is it only to those whose conscience still slumbers that events can seem sad