To M. Maeterlinck she is the supreme instance of the self-sufficing soul, independent and regardless of the material event.  She shows the emptiness, the impotence, the insignificance of all that we call “experience,” beside the spirit that endures.  “Not a single event ever paused as it passed by her threshold; yet did every event she could claim take place in her heart, with incomparable force and beauty, with matchless precision and detail.  We say that nothing ever happened; but did not all things really happen to her much more directly and tangibly than with most of us, seeing that everything that took place about her, everything that she saw or heard was transformed within her into thoughts and feelings, into indulgent love, admiration, adoration of life...?

“Of her happiness none can doubt.  Not in the soul of the best of all those whose happiness has lasted 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 love, sorrow, passion or anguish, still did she possess all that abides when emotion has faded away."[A]

[Footnote A:  Wisdom and Destiny, translated by Alfred Sutro.]

What was true of Charlotte, that her inner life was luminous with intense realization, was a hundred times more true of Emily.  It was so true that beside it nothing else that can be said is altogether true.  It is not necessary for a man to be convinced of the illusory nature of time and of material happenings in order to appreciate Charlotte’s genius; but his comprehension of Emily’s will be adequate or otherwise, according to the passion and sincerity with which he embraces that idea.  And he must have, further, a sense of the reality behind the illusion.  It is through her undying sense of it that Emily Bronte is great.  She had none of the proud appearances of the metaphysical mind; she did not, so far as we know, devour, like George Eliot, whole systems of philosophy in her early youth.  Her passionate pantheism was not derived; it was established in her own soul.  She was a mystic, not by religious vocation, but by temperament and by ultimate vision.  She offers the apparent anomaly of extreme detachment and of an unconquerable love of life.

It was the highest and the purest passion that you can well conceive.  For life gave her nothing in return.  It treated her worse than it treated Charlotte.  She had none of the things that, after all, Charlotte had; neither praise nor fame in her lifetime; nor friendship, nor love, nor vision of love.  All these things “passed her by with averted head”; and she stood in her inviolable serenity and watched them go, without putting out her hand to one of them.  You cannot surprise her in any piteous gesture of desire or regret.  And, unlike Charlotte, she made it impossible for you to pity her.