This is only beaten by that lyric passage that ends Villette; that sonorous dirge that rings high above all pathos, which is somehow a song of triumph, inspired by the whole power and splendour and magnificence of storm and death.

“The sun passes the equinox; the days shorten, the leaves grow sere; but—­he is coming.

“Frosts appear at night; November has sent his fogs in advance; the wind takes its autumn moan; but—­he is coming.

“The skies hang full and dark—­a rack sails from the west; the clouds cast themselves into strange forms—­arches and broad radiations; there rise resplendent mornings—­glorious, royal, purple, as monarch in his state; the heavens are one flame; so wild are they, they rival battle at its thickest—­so bloody, they shame Victory in her pride.  I know some signs of the sky, I have noted them ever since childhood.  God, watch that sail!  Oh, guard it!

“The wind shifts to the west.  Peace, peace, Banshee—­’keening’ at every window!  It will rise—­it will swell—­it shrieks out long:  wander as I may through the house this night, I cannot lull the blast.  The advancing hours make it strong; by midnight all sleepless watchers hear and fear a wild south-west storm.

“That storm roared frenzied for seven days.  It did not cease till the Atlantic was strewn with wrecks:  it did not lull till the deeps had gorged their fill of substance.  Not till the destroying angel of tempest had achieved his perfect work, would he fold the wings whose waft was thunder—­the tremor of whose plumes was storm.”

* * * * *

After Villette, the Last Sketch, the Fragment of Emma; that fragment which Charlotte Bronte read to her husband not long before her death.  All he said was, “The critics will accuse you of repetition.”

The critics have fulfilled his cautious prophecy.  The Fragment passed for one of those sad things of which the least said the better.  It was settled that Charlotte Bronte had written herself out, that if she had lived she would have become more and more her own plagiarist.  There is a middle-aged lady in Emma, presumably conceived on the lines of Mrs. Fairfax and Mrs. Pryor.  There is a girls’ school, which is only not Lowood because it is so obviously Roe Head or Dewsbury Moor.  There is a schoolmistress with sandy hair and thin lips and a cold blue eye, recalling Madame Beck, though there the likeness ceases.  And in that school, ill-treated by that schoolmistress, there is a little ugly, suffering, deserted child.