I have seen such kind and kindling eyes in the face of a visionary, born with a profound, incurable indifference to the material event; for whom the Real is the incredible, unapparent harmony that flows above, beneath, and within the gross flux of appearances.  To him it is the sole thing real.  That kind and kindling look I know to be simply a light reflected from the surface of the dream.  It is anything but cold; it has indeed a certain tender flame; but you would be profoundly mistaken if you argued from it more than the faintest polite interest in you and your affairs.  The kindling of Emily Bronte’s eyes I take to have had at times something of the same unearthly quality.  Strangers received from her an impression as of a creature utterly removed from them; a remoteness scarcely human, hard to reconcile with her known tenderness for every living thing.  She seems to have had a passionate repugnance to alien and external contacts, and to have felt no more than an almost reluctant liking for the lovable and charming Ellen Nussey.  Indeed, she regarded Charlotte’s friend with the large and virile tolerance that refuses to be charmed.

And yet in the depths of her virginal nature there was something fiercely tender and maternal.  There can be no doubt that she cared for Charlotte, who called her “Mine own bonnie love”; but she would seem to have cared far more for Anne who was young and helpless, and for Branwell who was helpless and most weak.

Thus there is absolutely nothing known of Emily that destroys or disturbs the image that Haworth holds of her; nothing that detaches her for a moment from her own people, and from her own place.  Her days of exile count not at all in her thirty years of home.  No separation ever broke, for one hour that counted, the bonds that bound her to her moors, or frustrated the divine passion of her communion with their earth and sky.  Better still, no tale of passion such as they tell of Charlotte was ever told of Emily.

It may be told yet, for no secret thing belonging to this disastrous family is sacred.  There may be somewhere some awful worshipper of Emily Bronte, impatient of her silence and unsatisfied with her strange, her virgin and inaccessible beauty, who will some day make up a story of some love-affair, some passion kindred to Catherine Earnshaw’s passion for Heathcliff, of which her moors have kept the secret; and he will tell his tale.  But we shall at least know that he had made it up.  And even so, it will have been better for that man if he had never been born.  He will have done his best to destroy or to deface the loveliness of a figure unique in literature.  And he will have ignored the one perfect, the one essentially true picture of Emily Bronte, which is to be found in Maurice Maeterlinck’s Wisdom and Destiny.