, her writings, if she had written at all, would have
possessed another character. Even had chance or taste led her to choose a
similar subject, she would have treated it otherwise. Had Ellis Bell been a lady
or a gentleman accustomed to what is called the world, her view of a remote and
unreclaimed region, as well as of the dwellers therein, would have differed
greatly from that actually taken by the homebred country girl. Doubtless it
would have been wider - more comprehensive: whether it would have been more
original or more truthful is not so certain. As far as the scenery and locality
are concerned, it could scarcely have been so sympathetic: Ellis Bell did not
describe as one whose eye and taste alone found pleasure in the prospect; her
native hills were far more to her than a spectacle; they were what she lived in,
and by, as much as the wild birds, their tenants, or as the heather, their
produce. Her descriptions, then, of natural scenery, are what they should be,
and all they should be.
    Where delineation of human character is concerned, the case is different. I
am bound to avow that she had scarcely more practical knowledge of the peasantry
amongst whom she lived, than a nun has of the country people who sometimes pass
her convent gates. My sister's disposition was not naturally gregarious;
circumstances favoured and fostered her tendency to seclusion; except to go to
church or take a walk on the hills, she rarely crossed the threshold of home.
Though her feeling for the people round was benevolent, intercourse with them
she never sought; nor, with very few exceptions, ever experienced. And yet she
knew them: knew their ways, their language, their family histories; she could
hear of them with interest, and talk of them with detail, minute, graphic, and
accurate; but with them, she rarely exchanged a word. Hence it ensued that what
her mind had gathered of the real concerning them, was too exclusively confined
to those tragic and terrible traits of which, in listening to the secret annals
of every rude vicinage, the memory is sometimes compelled to receive the
impress. Her imagination, which was a spirit more sombre than sunny, more
powerful than sportive, found in such traits material whence it wrought
creations like Heathcliff, like Earnshaw, like Catherine. Having formed these
beings, she did not know what she had done. If the auditor of her work when read
in manuscript, shuddered under the grinding influence of natures so relentless
and implacable, of spirits so lost and fallen; if