this gesture alone is real.  “The sage, who is lord of his life, can never truly be said to suffer.” wrote an admirable woman, who had known much sorrow herself.  “It is from the heights above that he looks down on his life, and if to-day he should seem to suffer, it is only because he has allowed his thoughts to incline towards the less perfect part of his soul.”  Emily Bronte not only breathes life into tenderness, loyalty, and love, but into hatred and wickedness also; nay, into the very fiercest revengeful ness, the most deliberate perfidy; nor does she deem it incumbent upon her to pardon, for pardon implies only incomplete comprehension.  She sees, she admits, and she loves.  She admits the evil as well as the good, she gives life to both; well knowing that evil, when all is said, is only righteousness strayed from the path.  She reveals to us—­not with the moralist’s arbitrary formula, but as men and years reveal the truths we have wit to grasp—­the final helplessness of evil, brought face to face with life; the final appeasement of all things in nature as well as in death, “which is only the triumph of life over one of its specialised forms.”  She shows how the dexterous lie, begotten of genius and strength, is forced to bow down before the most ignorant, puniest truth; she shows the self-deception of hatred that sows, all unwilling, the seeds of gladness and love in the life that it anxiously schemes to destroy.  She is, perhaps, the first to base a plea for indulgence on the great law of heredity; and when, at the end of her book, she goes to the village churchyard and visits the eternal resting-place of her heroes, the grass grows green alike over grave of tyrant and martyr; and she wonders how “any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.”

102.  I am well aware that here we are dealing with a woman of genius; but genius only throws into bolder relief all that can, and actually does, take place in the lives of all men; otherwise were it genius no longer, but incoherence or madness.  It becomes clear to us, after a time, that genius is by no means confined to the extraordinary; and that veritable superiority is composed of elements that every day offers to every man.  But we are not considering literature now; and indeed, not by her literary gifts, but by her inner life, was Emily Bronte comforted; for it by no means follows that moral activity waits on brilliant literary powers.  Had she remained silent, nor ever grasped a pen, still had there been no diminution of the power within her, of the smile and the fulness of love; still had she worn the air of one who knew whither her steps were tending; and the profound certainty that dwelt within her still had proclaimed that she had known how to make her peace, far up on the heights, with the great disquiet and misery of the world.  We should never have known of her—­that is all.