or sterile?  Did not love and beauty, happiness and adventure—­did not all that we go in search of along the ways of life congregate in Emily Bronte’s heart?  Day after day passed by, with never a joy or emotion; never a smile that the eye could see or the hand could touch; wherefore none the less did her destiny find its fulfilment, for the confidence within her, the eagerness, hope, animation, all were astir; and her heart was flooded with light, and radiant with silent gladness.  Of her happiness none can doubt.  Not in the soul of the best of all those whose happiness has lasted the longest, been the most active, diversified, perfect, could more imperishable harvest be found than in the soul Emily Bronte lays bare.  If to her there came nothing of all that passes in joy and in love, in sorrow, passion, and anguish, still did she possess all that abides when emotion has faded away.  Which of the two will know more of the marvellous palace—­the blind man who lives there, or the other, with wide-open eyes, who perhaps only enters it once?  “To live, not to live”—­we must not let mere words mislead us.  It is surely possible to live without thought, but not to think, without active life.  The essence of the joy or sorrow the event contains lies in the idea the event gives birth to:  our own idea, if we are strong; that of others, if we are weak.  On your way to the grave there may come a thousand external events towards you, whereof not one, it may be, shall find within you the force that it needs to turn to moral event.  Then may you truthfully say, and then only, “I have perhaps not lived.”  The intimate happiness of our heroine, as of every human being, was in exact proportion to her morality and her sense of the universe; and these indeed are the clearings in the forest of accidents whose area it is well we should know when we seek to measure the happiness a life has experienced.  Who that had gained the altitude of peace and comprehension whereon her soul reposed would still be wrought to feeble, bitter, unrefreshing tears by the cares and troubles and deceptions of ordinary life?  Who would not then understand why it was that she shed no tears, unlike so many of her sisters, who spend their lives in plaintive wanderings from one broken joy to another?  The joy that is dead weighs heavy, and bids fair to crush us, if we cause it to be with us for ever; which is as though a wood-cutter should refuse to lay down his load of dead wood.  For dead wood was not made to be eternally borne on the shoulder, but indeed to be burned, and give forth brilliant flame.  And as we behold the names that soar aloft in Emily’s soul, then are we as heedless as she was of the sorrows of the dead wood.  No misfortune but has its horizon, no sadness but shall know comfort, for the man who in the midst of his suffering, in the midst of the grief that must come to him as to all, has learned to espy Nature’s ample gesture beneath all sorrow and suffering, and has become aware that