 Volume 1, Section 9 of the Life of Charlotte Bronte. Chapter 7 Ms. Bronte left Roehead in 1832, having won the affectionate regard both of her teacher and her school fellows, and having formed there the two fast friendships which lasted her whole life long, the one with Mary, who has not kept her letters, the other with E., who has kindly entrusted me with a large portion of Ms. Bronte's correspondence with her. This she has been induced to do by her knowledge of the urgent desire on the part of Mr. Bronte, that the life of his daughter should be written, and in compliance with a request from her husband, that I should be permitted to have the use of these letters, at which such a task could be but very imperfectly executed. In order to shield this rent, however, from any blame or misconstruction, it is only right to state that, before granting me this privilege, she threw out most carefully and completely a face the names of the persons and places which occurred in them, and also that such information, as I have obtained from her, bears reference solely to Ms. Bronte and her sisters, and not to any other individuals whom I may find it necessary to allude to in connection with them. In looking over the earlier portion of this correspondence, I am struck afresh by the absence of hope which formed such a strong characteristic in Charlotte, at an age when girls in general look forward to an eternal duration of such feelings as they or their friends entertain, and can therefore see no hindrance to the fulfilment of any engagements dependent on the future state of the affections, she is surprised that he keeps a promised right. In afterlife I was painfully impressed with the fact that Ms. Bronte never dared to allow herself to look forward with hope, that she had no confidence in the future, and I thought, when I heard of the sorrowful years she had passed through, that it had been this, this pressure of grief which had crushed all buoyancy of expectation out of her. But it appears from the letters, that it must have been, so to speak, constitutional, or perhaps the deep pang of losing her two elder sisters combined with the permanent state of bodily weakness in producing her hopelessness. If her trust in God had been less strong, she would have given way to unbounded anxiety at many a period of her life. As it was, we shall see she made a great and successful effort to leave her times in his hands. After her return home, she employed herself in teaching her sisters, over whom she had had superior advantages. She rides thus July 21st, 1832, off her course of life at the Parsonage. An account of one day is an account of all. In the morning, from nine o'clock till half past twelve, I instruct my sisters, draw, then we walk till dinner time. After dinner, I sew till tea time, and after tea, I either ride, read, or do a little fancy work, or draw, as I plead. Thus in one delightful, though somewhat monotonous, course, my life is past. I have been only out twice to tea since I came home. We are expecting company this afternoon, and on Tuesday next we shall have all the female teachers of the Sunday school to tea. I may here introduce a quotation from a letter, which I have received from Mary, since a publication of the previous editions of this memoir. Soon after leaving school, she admitted reading something of cobbits. She did not like him, she said, but all was fish that came to her net. At this time she wrote to me that reading and drawing were the only amusements she had, and that her supply of books was very small in proportion to her wants. She never spoke of a round. When I saw Miss Brennell, she was a very precise person, and looked very odd, because the dress, etc., so utterly out of fashion. She corrected one of her swans for using the word spit or spitting. She made great favourite of Brennell. She made her niece a sew, with purpose or without, and as far as possible discouraged any other culture. She used to keep the girl sewing charity-clothing, and to maintain to me that it was not for the good of the recipients, but of the sewers. It was proper for them to do it, she said. Charlotte never was in wild excitement, that I know of. When in health she used to talk better, and indeed when in low spirits never spoke at all. She needed her best spirits to say what was in her heart, for at all the times she had not courage. She never gave decided opinions at such times. Charlotte said she could get on with anyone who had a bump at the top of their heads, meaning conscientiousness. I found that I seldom differed from her, except that she was far too tolerant of stupid people, if they had a grain of kindness in them. It was about this time that Mr. Bronte provided his children with the teacher in drawing, who turned out to be a man of considerable talent, but very little principle. Although they never attained to anything like proficiency, they took great interest in inquiring this art, evidently, from an instinctive desire to express their powerful imaginations in visible forms. Charlotte told me that at this period of her life, drawing and walking out with her sisters, formed the two great pleasures and relaxations of her day. The three girls used to walk upwards, toward the purple-black moors, the sweeping surface of which was broken by here and there a stone quarry, and if they had strength and time to go far enough, they reached a waterfall where the back fell over some rocks into the bottom. They seldom went downwards through the village. They were shy of meeting even familiar faces, and were scrupulous about entering the house of the very poorest uninvited. They were steady teachers at the Sunday school, a habit which Charlotte kept up very faithfully, even after she was left alone, but they never faced their kind voluntary, and always preferred the solitude and freedom of the moors. In the September of this year, Charlotte went to pay her first visit to her friend to E. It took her into the neighbourhood of Rowhead, and brought her into pleasant contact with many of her old school-fellows. After this visit, she and her friend seemed to have agreed to correspond in French for the sake of improvement in the language. But this improvement could not be great when it could only amount to a greater familiarity with dictionary words, and when there was no one to explain to them that a verbal translation of English idioms hardly constituted French composition. But the effort was laudable, and of itself shows how willing they both were to carry on the education which if they had begun under Ms. W. I will give an extract which, whatever may be thought of the language, is graphic enough and presents us with a happy little family picture, the eldest sister returning home to the two younger after a fortnight absence. I arrived in Ahorse in perfect safety on the mooring accident at Malheur. My little sisters ran out of the house to meet me as soon as the car was leaving, and she hugged me with so much pleasure and pleasure as if I had been absent for more than a year. My father, my aunt, and my brother-in-law had spoken, were all assembled in the living room. And in a little while, I said to myself, it is often the order of the sky that when we have lost a pleasure there is another ready to take its place. Thus I came to leave very dear to my friend, but earlier I dreamed of parents so dear and good at the moment. Even though you lost me, dare I believe that my departure was in Chagrin, you expected the arrival of your brother and your sister. I gave my sisters the apples that you sent them with so much love. They say they are sure that my mother is very kind and good. One and the other are extremely impatient to see you. I hope as soon as possible they will have this pleasure. But it was some time yet before the friends could meet, and meanwhile they agreed to correspond once a month. There were no events to chronicle in the Howarth's letters, quiet days occupied in reading, and feminine occupations in the house did not present much to write about, and Charlotte was naturally driven to criticise books. Of these there were many in different plights, and according to their plight kept in different places. The well-bound were arranged in the sanctuary of Mr. Bronte's study, but the purges of books was a necessary luxury to him, but as it was often a choice between binding an old one, or buying a new one, the familiar volume which had been hungrily read by all the members of the family, was sometimes in such a condition that a bedroom shelf was considered its fitting place. Up and down the house were to be found many standard works of a solid kind. So Walter Scott's writings, Wordsworth's, and Southie's poems were among delight literature, while as having a character of their own, earnest, wild, and occasionally fanatical, may be named some of the books which came from the Bremel side of the family, from the Cornish followers of the saintly John Wesley, and which are touched on in the account of the works to which Carolyn Hellstone had access in Shirley. Some venerable ladies' magazines, that had once performed a voyage with Serona and under Garner's Storm, possibly part of the relics of Mrs. Bronte's possessions, contained him the shipwrecked on the coast of Cornwall, and whose pages were stained with salt water. Some mad, Methodist magazines, full of miracles and apparitions, and preternatural warnings, ominous dreams, and frenzied phonesticisms, and the equally mad letters of Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe from the dead to the living. Mrs. Bronte encouraged to taste for reading in his girls, and though Miss Branwell kept it in due bounds by the variety of household occupations, in which she expected them not merely to take apart, but to become proficient, thereby occupying regularly a good portion of every day, they were allowed to get books from the circulating library at Cayley, and many a happy walk up those long-form miles must they have had, burdened with some new book into which they peeped as they hurried home. Not that the books, where what would generally be called new, in the beginning of 1833, the two friends seem almost simultaneously to have fallen upon Kenilworth, and Charlotte writes as follows about it, I am glad you like Kenilworth. It is certainly more resembling a romance than a novel, in my opinion, one of the most interesting works that ever emanated from the great Sir Walter's pen. Varnay is certainly the personification of consummate villainy, and in the delusionation of his dark and profoundly artful mind, Scott exhibits a wonderful knowledge of human nature, as well as a surprising skill in embodying his perceptions, so as to enable others to become participators in that knowledge. Commonplace as this extract may seem, it is noteworthy on two or three accounts. In the first place, instead of discussing the plot or story, she analyses the character of Varnay, and next, she, knowing nothing of the world, both from her youth and her isolated position, has yet been so accustomed to hear human nature distrusted as to receive the notion of intense and artful villainy without surprise. What was formal and set in her way of writing to E, diminished as her personal acquaintance increased, and as each came to know the home of the other, so that small details concerning people and places had their interest and their significance. In the summer of 1833, she wrote to invite a friend to come and pay her a visit. Aunt thought it would be better, she says, to defer it until about the middle of summer, as the winter and even the spring seasons are remarkably cold and bleak among our mountains. The first impression made on the visitor by the sisters of her school friend was that Emily was a tall, long-armed girl, more fully grown than her elder sister, extremely reserved in manner. I distinguish reserve from shyness, because I imagine shyness would please, if it knew how, whereas reserve is indifferent whether it pleases or not. Even like Carell the sister, or shy, Emily was reserved. Branwell was rather a handsome boy with tawny hair, to use Miss Bronte's phrase for a more obnoxious colour. All were very clever, original, and utterly different to any people or family E had ever seen before, but on the whole it was a happy visit to all parties. That says in writing to E just after her return home. Where I to tell you of the impression you have made on every one here, you would accuse me of flattery. Papa and Aunt are continually adusing you as an example for me to shape my actions and behaviour by. Emily and Aunt say they never saw any one they liked so well as you, and Tabby, whom you have absolutely fascinated, talk to great deal more nonsense about your ladyship than I care to repeat. It is now so dark that, notwithstanding the singular property of seeing in the night time, which the young ladies at Roehead used to attribute to me, I could scrabble no longer. To a visitor at the Parsonage, it was a great thing to have Tabby's good word. She had a Yorkshire keenness of perception into character, and it was not everybody she liked. Howarth is built with an utter disregard of all sanitary conditions. The great old churchyard lies above all the houses, and it is terrible to think how the very water springs of the pumps below must be poisoned. This winter of 1833-34 was particularly wet and rainy, and there were an unusual number of deaths in the village. A dreary season it was to the family in the Parsonage. Their usual walks obstructed by the spongy stages and moors, the passing and funeral bells so frequently tolling, and filling the heavy air with their mournful sound, and when they were still, the chip-chip of the mason as he kept the gravestones in the shed-clothes by. In many, living as it were in a churchyard, and with all the sights and sounds, connected with the last offices to deduct things of every day occurrence, the very familiarity would have bred indifference. But it was otherwise with Charlotte Bronte. One of her friends says, I have seen her turn pale and feel faint, when in heartshead church someone accidentally remarked that we were walking over graves. Charlotte was certainly afraid of death, not only of dead bodies or dying people. She dreaded it as something horrible. She thought we did not know how long the moment of disillusion might really be or how terrible. This was just such a terror as only hypocondriacs can provide for themselves. She told me long ago that a misfortune was often preceded by the dream frequently repeated, which he gives to Jane Eyre, of carrying a lesser wailing child and being unable to still it. She described herself as having the most painful sense of pity for the little thing lying inert, as sick children do, while she walked about in some gloomy place with it, such as the Ale of Howard's Church. The misfortunes she mentioned were not always to herself. She thought such a sensitivity to omens was like the cholera, present to susceptible people, some feeling more, some less. Up the beginning of 1834, E went to London for the first time. The idea of a friend's visit seemed to have stirred Charlotte strangely. She appears to have formed her notions of its probable consequences from some of the papers and the British essayists, the Rembler, the Mirror, or the Lounger, which may have been among the English classics on the Parsonage bookshelves, for she evidently imagines that an entire change of character for the worse is the usual effect of a visit to the Great Metropolis, and is delighted to find that E is E still. And as a faith in her friend's stability has restored, her own imagination is deeply moved by the idea of what great wonders are to be seen in that vast and famous city. Hours February 20th, 1834 Your letter gave me real and heartfelt pleasure, mingled with no small share of astonishment. Mary had previously informed me of your departure for London, and I had not ventured to calculate on any communication from you while surrounded by the splendours and novelties of that great city, which has been called the mercantile metropolis of Europe. Coming from human nature, I thought that a little country girl for the first time in a situation so well-calculated to excite curiosity and to distract attention would lose all remembrance, for a time at least, of distant and familiar objects, and give herself up entirely to the fascination of those scenes which were then presented to you. Your kind, interesting, and most welcome epistle showed me, however, that I had been both mistaken and untreatable in these suppositions. I was greatly amused at the tone of nonchalance which you assumed, while treating of London and its wonders. Did you not feel awed while gazing at St Paul's and Westminster Ravi? Had you no feeling of intense and ardent interest, when in St James's you saw the palace where so many of England's kings have held their cords, and beheld the representations of their persons on the walls? You should not be too much afraid of appearing country-bred. The magnificence of London has drawn exclamations of astonishment from travelled men experienced in the world its wonders and beauties. Have you yet seen anything of the great personages whom the sitting of Parliament now detains in London? To Duke of Wellington, Sir Robert Peel, Earl Grey, Mrs. Stanley, Mr. O'Connell? If I were you, I would not be too anxious to spend my time in reading whilst in town. Make use of your own eyes for the purposes of observation now, and, for a time at least, lay aside the spectacles with which authors would furnish this. In a post-script, she adds, will you be kind enough to inform me of the number of performers in the king's military band? And in something of the same strain she writes on, June 19th, my own dear E. I may rightfully and truly call you so now. You have returned, or are returning from London, from the great city which is to me as apocryphal as Babylon or Nineveh or ancient Rome. You are withdrawing from the world, as it is called, and bringing with you, if your letters enable me to form a correct judgment, a heart as unsophisticated, as natural, as true, as a third you carried there. I am slow, very slow, to believe the protestations of another. I know my own sentiments, I can read my own mind, but the minds of the rest of men and woman-kind are to me sealed volumes, hieroglyphical scrolls which I cannot easily either unseal or decipher. Yet time, careful study, long acquaintance, overcome most difficulties, and in your case, I think they have succeeded well in bringing to light and construing that hidden language whose turnings, whinings, inconsistencies, and obscurities so frequently baffle the researchers of the honest observer of human nature. I am truly grateful for your mindfulness of so obscure a person as myself, and I hope the pleasure is not altogether selfish. I trust it is partly derived from the consciousness that my fenced character is of a higher, a more steadfast order than I was once perfectly aware of. Few girls would have done as you have done, would have beheld the glare and glitter and dazzling display of London, with dispositions so unchanged, hard so uncontaminated. I see no affectation in your letters, no trifling, no frivolous contempt of plain and weak admiration of showy persons and things. In these days of cheap railway trips, we may smile at the idea of a short visit to London having any great effect upon the character whatever it may have upon the intellect. But her London, her great apocryphal city, was the town of a century before to which giddy daughters dragged unwilling papas, or went with injudicious friends to the detriment of all their better qualities, and sometimes to the ruin of their fortunes. It was of the vanity fair of the pilgrims' progress to her. But see that just an admirable sense with which she can treat a subject of which is able to overlook all the bearings. How was July 4th, 1834? In your last you request me to tell you of your faults. Now really, how can you be so foolish? I won't tell you of your faults, because I don't know them. What a creature would that be who, after receiving an affectionate and kind letter from a beloved friend, should sit down and write a catalogue of defects by way of answer? Consider me doing so, and then consider what epithets you would bestow on me. Conceited dogmatical, hypocritical little humbug, I should think, would be the mildest. Why, child, I've nice a time nor inclination to reflect on your faults when you are so far from me, and when, besides kind letters and presents and so forth, are continually bringing forth your goodness in the most prominent light. Then, too, there are judicious relations always round you who can much better discharge that unpleasant office. I have no doubt there it was, as completely at your service. Why, then, should I intrude mine? If you will not hear them, it will be vain, though one should rise from the dead to instruct you. Let us have no more nonsense, if you laugh me. Mr. Blank is going to be married, is he? Well, his wife-elect appeared to me to be a clever and amiable lady, as far as I could judge from the little I saw of her, and from your account. Now, to that flattering sentence, must I tack on a list of her faults? You say it is in contemplation for you to leave Blank. I am sorry for it. Blank is a pleasant spot, one of the old family halls of England, surrounded by lawn and woodland, speaking of past times, and suggesting, to me at least, happy feelings. I haven't thought you've grown less, did she? I am not grown a bit, but they're short and dumpy as ever. You're asking me to recommend to you some books for your perusal. I will do so in as few words as I can. If you like poetry, let it be First Raid, Melton, Shakespeare, Thumson, Goldsmiths, Pope, if you will, though I don't admire him, Scott, Byron, Campbell, Wordsworth, and Sousy. Now, don't be startled at the names of Shakespeare and Byron. Both these were great men, and their works are like themselves. You will know how to choose the good and to avoid the evil. The finest passages are always the purest, the bad are invariably revolting, you will never wish to read them over-twice. I met the comedies of Shakespeare and the Don Juan, perhaps the cane of Byron, so if the letter is a magnificent poem, and read the rest fearlessly, that must indeed be a deep rave mind which can gather evil from Henry VIII, from Richard III, from Macbeth and Hamlet and Julius Caesar. What sweet, wild, romantic poetry can do you no harm, nor can Wordsworth's, nor Campbell's, nor Sousy's, the greatest part at least of his, some is certainly objectionable. For history, read Hume, Rollin, and the Universal History, if you can, I never did. For fiction, read Scott alone, all lovers after his are worthless. For biography, read Johnson's, Life of the Poets, Boswell's, Life of Johnson, Sousy's, Life of Nelson, Lockhart's, Life of Burns, Moore's, Life of Sheridan, Moore's, Life of Byron, Moore's Remains. For natural history, read Bewick and Audubon, and Goldsmith and White History of Selborne. For divinity, your brother will advise you there. I can only say, at ear to stand the authors, and devoid novelty. From this list we see that she must have had a good range of books from which to choose her own reading. It is evident that the warmly consciences of these two correspondents were anxiously alive to many questions discussed among the stricter religionists. The morality of Shakespeare needed the confirmation of Charlotte's opinion to the sensitive E, and a little later she inquired where the dancing was objectionable, when indulged in foreign hour or two in parties of boys and girls. Charlotte replies, I should hesitate to express the difference of opinion from Mr. Blank, or from your excellent sister, but really, the matter seems to me to stem thus. It is allowed in all hands that the sin of dancing consists not in the mere action of shaking the shanks, as a scotch say, but in the consequences that usually attended, namely frivolity and waste of time. When it is used only, as in the case you state, for the exercise and amusement of an hour among young people who surely may without any breach of God's commandments be allowed to let a light-heartedness. These consequences cannot follow. Ogo, according to my manner of arguing, the amusement is at such times perfectly innocent. Although the distance between Howarth and B was but seventeen miles, it was difficult to go straight from one to the other without harrowing a gig or vehicle of some kind for the journey. Since a visit from Charlotte required a good deal of free arrangement. The Howarth's gig was not always to be heard, and Mr. Bronte was often unwilling to fall into any arrangement for meeting at Bradford, or other places, which would occasion trouble to others. The whole family had an ample share of such sensitive pride, which led them to dread incurring obligations, and to fear outstaying their welcome when on any visit. I am not sure where the Mr. Bronte did not consider distrust of others as a part of that knowledge of human nature, on which he peaked himself. As precepts to this effect, combined with Charlotte's lack of hope, made her always fearful of loving too much, of varying the objects of her affection, and that she was often trying to restrain her warm feelings, and was ever cherry of that present so invariably welcome to her true friends. According to this mode of acting, when she was invited for a month, she stayed but a fourth night amidst E's family, to whom every visit only endeared her some more, and by whom she was received with that kind of quiet gladness with which they would have greeted a sister. She still kept up her childish interest in politics. In March 1835, she writes, What do you think of the cause politics are taking? I make this inquiry, because I now think you take a wholesome interest in the matter. Formerly you did not care greatly about it. B.U.C. is triumphant. Wretch! I am a hearty hater! And if there is any one I thoroughly appall, it is that man. But the opposition is divided, Red Hots and Luke Worms, and the Duke, Bar Exalante, the Duke, and so Robert Fields shown no signs of insecurity, though they have been twice beat, so Gouraj Monomi, as the old chivaliers used to say before they joined battle. In the middle of the summer of 1835, a great family plan was mooted at the Parsonage. The question was to what trade or profession should Manuel be brought up. He was now nearly eighteen, it was time to decide. He was very clever, no doubt, perhaps to begin with, the greatest genius in this rare family. The sisters hardly recognized their own, or each other's powers, but they knew his. The father, ignorant of many failings in moral conduct, did proud homage to the great gifts of his son, for Brenmle's talents were readily and willingly brought out for the entertainment of others. Popular admiration was sweet to him, and this latterous presence being sought at Arvils and all the great village gatherings, for the Yorkshire men have a keen relish for intellect, and it likewise procured him the undesirable distinction of having his company recommended by the landlord of the Black Bull to any chance traveller who might happen to feel solitary or dull over his liquor. Do you want someone to help you with your bottle, sir? If you do, I'll send up for Patrick. Though the villagers called him till the day of his death, though in his own family was always Brenmle. And while the messenger went, the landlord entertained his guest with the count of the wonderful talents of the boy, whose precocious cleverness and great conversational power was worth the pride of the village. The attacks of ill health to which Mr. Bronte had been subject of late years, rendered not only necessary that he should take his dinner alone, for the sake of avoiding temptations to unwholesome diet, but made it also desirable that he should pass the time directly succeeding his meals in perfect quiet. And this necessity, combined with due attention to his parochial duties, made him partially ignorant how his son employed himself out of lesson time. His own youth had been spent among people of the same conventional rank, as of those into whose companionship Brenmle was now thrown. But he had had a strong will, and an earnest and persevering ambition, and a resoluteness of purpose which his weaker son wanted. It is singular how stronger yearning the whole family had towards the art of drawing. Mr. Bronte had been very solicitors to get them good instruction. The girls themselves loved everything connected with it. All descriptions or engravings of great pictures, and in default of good ones, they would take and analyse any print or drawing which came in their way, and find out how much thought had gone to its composition, what ideas it was intended to suggest, and what it did suggest. In the same spirit, they laboured to design imaginations of their own. They lacked the power of execution, not of conception. At one time, Charlotte had the notion of making her living as an artist, and varied her eyes in drawing with berefelate minute-ness, but not with berefelate accuracy, for she drew from fancy rarer than from nature. But they all thought there could be no doubt about Branwell's talent for drawing. I have seen an oil-painting of his done, I know not when, but probably about this time. It was a group of his sisters, life-size, three-quarters length, not much better than sign-painting as to manipulation, but the likenesses were, I should think, admirable. I could only judge of the fidelity with which the other two were depicted, from the striking resemblance which Charlotte, upholding the great frame of canvas, and consequently standing right behind it, bore to her own representation, though it must have been ten years and more since a portrait were taken. The picture was divided almost in the middle by great pillar. On the side of the column, which was lighted by the suns, stood Charlotte in the warmly dress of that day of gigo sleeves and large collars. On the deeply shadowed side was Emily, with Anne's gentle face resting on her shoulder. Emily's countenance struck me as full of power, Charlotte's of solicitude, Anne's of tenderness. The two younger seemed hardly to have attained their full growth, though Emily was taller than Charlotte. They had cropped hair and a more girlish dress. I remember looking on those two sad, earnest, shadowed faces, and wondering whether I could trace the mysterious expression which is said to foretell an early death. I had some fond superstitious hope that a column divided their fates from hers, who stood apart in the canvas, as in life she survived. I liked to see that right side of the pillar was towards her, that a light in the picture fell on her. I might more truly have sought in a presentment, nay in her living face, for the sign of death in her prime. They were good likenesses, however badly executed. From thence I should guess his family augur truly that if Brennell had but the opportunity, and alas had but the moral qualities, he might turn out a great painter. The best way of preparing him to become so, appear to be to send him as a pupil to the Royal Academy. I dare say he longed and yearned to follow this path, principally because it would lead him to that mysterious London, that Babylon the Great, which seems to have felt the imaginations and haunted the minds of all the younger members of this recluse family. To Brennell it was more than a vivid imagination, it was an impressed reality. By dint of studying maps, he was as well acquainted with it, even down to its by-ways, as if he had lived there. Poor misguided fellow, this craving to see and know London, and that stronger craving after fame, were never to be satisfied. He was to die at the end of a short and blighted life. But in this year of 1835 all his home kindred were sinking how they could best forward his views, and how help him up to the pinnacle where he desired to be. What their plans were, let Charlotte explain. These are not the first sisters who have laid their lives as a sacrifice before their brother's idolised wish. Would to God, there might be the last who met with such a miserable return. Howarth, July 6th, 1835 I had hoped to have had the extreme pleasure of seeing you at Howarth this summer, but human affairs are mutable, and human resolutions must bend to the cause of events. We are all about to divide, rake up, separate. Emily is going to school, Branwell is going to London, and I am going to be a governess. This last determination I formed myself, knowing that I should have to take the steps on time, and better soon as signer, to use a Scotch-Bro verb. And knowing well that Papa would have enough to do with his limited income, should Branwell be placed at the Royal Academy, and Emily at Roehead. Where am I going to reside, you will ask, within four miles of you, at a place neither of us is unacquainted with, being no other than the identical Roehead mentioned above. Yes, I am going to teach, and the very school where I was myself taught. Miss W. made me the offer, and I preferred it to one or two proposals of private governorship, which I had before received. I am sad, very sad at the thoughts, of leaving home, with duty, necessity. These are stern mistresses, who will not be disobeyed. Did I not once say you ought to be thankful for your independence? I felt what I said at the time, and I repeat it now with double earnestness. If anything would cheer me, it is the idea of being so near you. Surely you and Polly will come and see me. It would be wrong in me to doubt it. You were never unkind yet. Emily and I leave home on the twenty-seventh of this month. The idea of being together consoles us both somewhat. And truth, since I must enter a situation, my lines have fallen in pleasant places. I both love and respect Miss W. End of Section 9 On the twenty-ninth of July, 1835, Charlotte, now a little more than nineteen years old, went as a teacher to Miss W.'s. Emily accompanied her as a pupil, but she became literally ill from homesickness, and could not settle to anything. And after passing only three months at Rowhead, returned to the parsonage and the beloved moors. Chante gives the following reasons as those which prevented Emily's remaining at school and caused the substitution of her younger sister in her place at Miss W.'s. My sister Emily loved the moors. Flowers brighter than the rose bloomed in the blackest of the heath for her. Out of a sullen hollow in a livid hillside her mind could make an Eden. She found in the bleak solitude many and dear delights, but the least and best loved was Liberty. Liberty was the breath of Emily's nostrils, without it she perished. The change from her own home to a school, and from her own very noiseless, very secluded, but unrestricted in unartificial mode of life, to one of disciplined routine, though under the kindest auspices, was what she failed in enduring. Her nature proved here too strong for her fortitude. Every morning when she woke, the vision of home and the moors rushed on her and darkened and saddened the day that lay before her. Nobody knew what ailed her but me. I knew only too well. In this struggle her health was quickly broken. Her white face, attenuated form and failing strength, threatened rapid decline. I felt in my heart she would die if she did not go home, and with this conviction obtained her recall. She had only been three months at school, and it was some years before the experiment of sending her from home was again ventured on. This physical suffering on Emily's part when absent from Hayworth, after recurring several times under similar circumstances, became at length so much an acknowledged fact that whichever was obliged to leave home, the sisters decided that Emily must remain there. We are alone, she could enjoy anything like good health. She left it twice again in her life, once going as teacher to a school in Halifax for six months, and afterwards accompanying Charlotte to Brussels for ten. When at home she took the principal part of the cooking upon herself and did all the household ironing, and after Tabby grew old and infirm, it was Emily who made all the bread for the family, and any one passing by the kitchen door might have seen her studying German out of an open book propped up before her, as she needed the dough, but no study, however interesting, interfered with the goodness of the bread, which was always light and excellent. Books were indeed a very common sight in that kitchen. The girls were taught by their father theoretically and by their aunt practically, that to take an active part in all household work was in their position woman's simple duty, but in their careful employment of time they found many an odd five minutes for reading while watching the cakes and managed the union of two kinds of employment better than King Alfred. Charlotte's life at Miss W's was a very happy one until her health failed. She sincerely loved and respected the former school mistress to whom she was now become both companion and friend. The girls were hardly strangers to her, some of them being younger sisters of those who had been her own playmates. Though the duties of the day might be tedious and monotonous, there were always two or three happy hours to look forward to in the evening when she and Miss W sat together, sometimes late into the night, and had quiet, pleasant conversations or pauses of silence as agreeable, because each felt that as soon as a thought or remark occurred which they wished to express, there was an intelligent companion ready to sympathize, and yet they were not compelled to make talk. Miss W was always anxious to afford Miss Bronte every opportunity of recreation in her power, but the difficulty often was to persuade her to avail herself of the invitations which came, urging her to spend Saturday and Sunday with E and Mary in their respective homes that lay within the distance of a walk. She was too apt to consider that allowing herself a holiday was a dereliction of duty and to refuse herself the necessary change from something of an over-acetic spirit, betokening a loss of healthy balance in either body or mind. Indeed it is clear that such was the case from a passage referring to this time in the letter of Mary from which I have before given extracts. Three years after the period when they were at school together, I heard that she had gone as teacher to Miss W's. I went to see her and asked how she could give so much for so little money when she could live without it. She owned that after clothing herself in Anne there was nothing left, though she had hoped to be able to save something. She confessed it was not brilliant, but what could she do? I had nothing to answer. She seemed to have no interest or pleasure beyond the feeling of duty and, when she could get, used to sit alone and make out. She told me afterwards that one evening she had sat in the dressing room until it was quite dark and then, observing it all at once, had taken sudden fright. No doubt she remembered this well when she described a similar terror getting hold upon Jane Eyre. She says in the story, I sat looking at the white bed and overshadowed walls, occasionally turning a fascinated eye towards the gleaming mirror. I began to recall what I had heard of dead men, troubled in their graves. I endeavored to be firm, shaking my hair from my eyes. I lifted my head and tried to look boldly through the dark room. At this moment a ray from the moon penetrated some aperture in the blind. No, moonlight was still, and this stirred. Prepared as my mind was for horror, shaken as my nerves were by agitation, I thought the swift darting beam was a herald of some coming vision from another world. My heart beat thick, my head grew hot, a sound filled my ears which I deemed to the rustling of wings. Something seemed near me. Footnote. Jane Eyre, volume one, page twenty. End of footnote. From that time, Mary adds, her imaginations became gloomy or frightful. She could not help it, nor help thinking. She could not forget the gloom, could not sleep at night, nor attend in the day. She told me that one night, sitting alone, about this time, she heard a voice repeat these lines. Come now high in holy feeling, shine o'er mountain, flit o'er wave, gleam like light, o'er dome and shielding. There were eight or ten more lines which I forget. She insisted that she had not made them, that she had heard a voice repeat them. It is possible that she had read them and unconsciously recalled them. They are not in the volume of poems which the sisters published. She repeated a verse of Isaiah which she said had inspired them, and which I have forgotten. Whether the lines were recollected or invented, the tale proves such habits of sedentary, monotonous solitude of thought as would have shaken a feebler mind. Of course the state of health thus described came on gradually and is not to be taken as a picture of her condition in 1836. Yet even then there is a despondency in some of her expressions that too sadly reminds one of some of Cowper's letters, and it is remarkable how deeply his poems impressed her. His words, his verses came more frequently to her memory, I imagine, than those of any other poet. Mary says, Cowper's poem The Castaway was known to them all, and they all at times appreciated or almost appropriated it. Charlotte told me once that Branwell had done so, and though his depression was the result of his faults, it was in no other respect different from hers. Both were not mental but physical illnesses. She was well aware of this, and would ask how that mended matters as the feeling was there all the same and was not removed by knowing the cause. She had a larger religious toleration than a person would have who had never questioned, and the manner of recommending religion was always that of offering comfort, not fiercely enforcing a duty. One time I mentioned that someone had asked me what religion I was of, with the view of getting me for a partisan, and that I had said that that was between God and me. Emily, who was lying on the hearth rug, exclaimed, That's right! This was all I ever heard Emily say on religious subjects. Charlotte was free from religious depression when intolerable health, when that failed her depression returned. You have probably seen such instances. They don't get over their difficulties. They forget them when their stomach or whatever organ it is that inflicts such misery on sedentary people will let them. I have heard her condemn socialism, Calvinism, and many other isms inconsistent with Church of Englandism. I used to wonder at her acquaintance with such subjects. May 10th, 1836 I was struck with the note you sent me with the umbrella. It showed a degree of interest in my concerns, which I have no right to expect from any earthly creature. I won't play the hypocrite. I won't answer your kind, gentle, friendly questions in the way you wish me to. Don't deceive yourself by imagining I have a bit of real goodness about me. My darling, if I were like you, I should have my face Zion ward, though prejudice and error might occasionally flinging mist over the glorious division before me. But I am not like you. If you knew my thoughts, the dreams that absorb me, and the fiery imagination that at times eats me up and makes me feel society as it is wretchedly insipid, you would pity and I daresay despise me. But I know the treasures of the Bible. I love and adore them. I can see the well of life in all its clearness and brightness, but when I stoop down to drink of the pure waters, they fly from my lips as if I were tantalists. You are far too kind and frequent in your invitations. You puzzle me. I hardly know how to refuse, and it is still more embarrassing to accept. At any rate, I cannot come this week, for we are in the very thickest melee of the repetitions. I was hearing the terrible fifth section when your note arrived. But Miss Wooler says I must go to Mary next Friday, as she promised for me on Witt Sunday, and on Sunday morning I will join you at church if it be convenient, and stay till Monday. There's a free and easy proposal. Miss W has driven me to it. She says her character is implicated. Good kind, Miss W. However monotonous and trying were the duties Charlotte had to perform under her roof, there was always a genial and thoughtful friend watching over her, and urging her to partake of any little piece of innocent recreation that might come in her way. And in those mid-summer holidays of 1836, her friend E. came to stay with her at Hayworth, so there was one happy time secured. Here follows a series of letters not dated, but belonging to the latter portion of this year, and again we think of the gentle and melancholy cowper. My dear, dear E. I am at this moment trembling all over with excitement after reading your note. It is what I never received before. It is the unrestrained pouring out of a warm, gentle, generous heart. I thank you with energy for this kindness. I will no longer shrink from answering your questions. I do wish to be better than I am. I pray fervently sometimes to be made so. I have stings of conscience, visitings of remorse, glimpses of holy, of inexpressible things, which formerly I used to be a stranger to. It may all die away, and I may be an utter midnight, but I implore a merciful redeemer that if this be the dawn of the gospel, it may still brighten to perfect day. Do not mistake me, do not think I am good. I only wish to be so. I only hate my former flippancy and forwardness. Oh, I am no better than ever I was. I am in that state of horrid, gloomy uncertainty that at this moment I would submit to be old, grey-haired, to have passed all my youthful days of enjoyment, and to be settling on the verge of the grave if I could only thereby ensure the prospect of reconciliation to God and redemption through His Son's merits. I never was exactly careless of these matters, but I have always taken a clouded and repulsive view of them, and now, if possible, the clouds are gathering darker and a more oppressive despondency weighs on my spirits. You have cheered me, my darling, for a moment, for an atom of time I thought I might call you my own sister in the spirit, but the excitement has passed and I am now as wretched and hopeless as ever. This very night I will pray as you wish me. May the Almighty hear me compassionately, and I humbly hope He will, for you will strengthen my polluted petitions with your own pure requests. All is bustle and confusion round me, the ladies pressing with their sums and their lessons. If you love me, do, do, do come on Friday, I shall watch and wait for you, and if you disappoint me, I shall weep. I wish you could know the thrill of delight which I experienced when, as I stood at the dining-room window, I saw, as he world-passed, toss your little packet over the wall. Harder spilled market-day was still the great period for events at Rowhead, then girls running round the corner of the house sleeping between tree-stems and up a shadowy lane could catch a glimpse of a father or brother driving to market in his gig, might perhaps exchange a wave of the hand or see, as Chalaparante did from the window, a white packet tossed over the avail by some swift strong motion of an arm, the rest of the traveller's body unseen. Weary with the day's hard work, I am sitting down to write a few lines to my dear E. Excuse me if I say nothing but nonsense, for my mind is exhausted and dispirited. It is a stormy evening, and the wind is uttering a continual moaning sound that makes me feel very melancholy. At such times, in such moods as these, it is my nature to seek repose in some calm, tranquil idea, and I have now summoned up your image to give me rest. There you sit upright and still in your black dress and white scarf and pale marble-like face, just like reality. I wish you would speak to me, if we should be separated, if it should be our lot to live at a great distance and never to see each other again. In old age, how I should conjure up the memory of my youthful days and what a melancholy pleasure I should feel in dwelling on the recollection of my early friend. I have some qualities that make me very miserable, some feelings that you can have no participation in, that few, very few people in the world can at all understand. I don't pride myself on these peculiarities. I strive to conceal and suppress them as much as I can, but they burst out sometimes, and then those who see the explosion despise me and I hate myself for days afterwards. I have just received your epistle and what accompanied it. I can't tell what should induce you and your sisters to waste your kindness on such a one as me. I hope you'll tell them so. I'm obliged to you also more for your note than for your present. The first gave me pleasure, the last something like pain. The nervous disturbance which is stated to have troubled her while she was at Miss W's seems to have begun to distress her about this time. At least she herself speaks of her irritable condition which was certainly only a temporary ailment. You have been very kind to me of late and have spared me all those little sallies of ridicule which, owing to my miserable and wretched touchiness of character used formally to make me wince as if I had been touched with a hot iron. Things that nobody else cares for enter into my mind and wrinkle there like venom. I know these feelings are absurd and therefore I try to hide them but they only sting the deeper for concealment. Compare this state of mind with the gentle resignation which she had submitted to be put aside as useless or told of her ugliness by her school fellows only three years before. My life since I saw you has passed as monotonously and unbroken as ever nothing but teach, teach, teach from morning till night. The greatest variety I ever have is afforded by a letter from you or by meeting with a pleasant new book. The life of Oberlin and Lee Richmond's domestic portraiture are the last of this description. The latter work strongly attracted and strangely fascinated my attention. Beg, borrow or steal it without delay and read the memoir of Will Beforce. That short record of a brief, uneventful life I shall never forget it. It is beautiful, not on account of the language in which it is written, not on account of the incidents and details but because of the simple narrative it gives of a young, talented, sincere Christian. About this time Miss W. removed her school from the fine, open, breezy situation of Rowhead to Dewsbury Moor only two or three miles distant. Her new residence was on a lower site and the air was less exhilarating to one bread in the wild hill village of Hayworth. Emily had gone as teacher to a school at Halifax where there were nearly forty pupils. I have had one letter from her since her departure, writes Charlotte, on October 2nd, 1836. It gives an appalling account of her duties, hard labor from six in the morning to eleven at night with only one half hour of exercise between. This is slavery. I fear she can never stand it. When the sisters met at home in the Christmas holidays they talked over their lives and the prospect which they afforded of employment and remuneration. They felt that it was a duty to relieve their father of the burden of their support if not entirely, or that of all three, at least that of one or two, and naturally the lot devolved upon the elder ones to find some occupation which would enable them to do this. They knew that they were never likely to inherit much money. Mr. Bronte had but a small stipend and was both charitable and liberal. Their aunt had an annuity of fifty pounds and it reverted to others at her death and her nieces had no right and were the last persons in the world to reckon upon her savings. What could they do? Charlotte and Emily were trying teaching and, as it seemed, without much success. The former, it is true, had the happiness of having a friend for her employer and of being surrounded by those who knew her and loved her but her salary was too small for her to save out of it and she enrolled her to a larger. The sedentary and monotonous nature of the life, too, was preying upon her health and spirits, although, with necessity, as her mistress, she might heartily like to acknowledge this even to herself. But Emily, that free, wild, untameable spirit, never happy nor well but on the sweeping wars that gathered round her home, that hater of strangers doomed to live amongst them and not merely to live in a slave in their service. What Charlotte could have borne patiently for herself she could not bear for her sister and yet what to do. She had once hoped that she herself might become an artist and so earn her livelihood but her eyes had failed her in the minute and useless labour which she had imposed upon herself with a view to this end. It was the household custom among these girls to sew till nine o'clock at night. At that hour Miss Branwell generally went to bed and her niece's duties for the day were accounted done. They put away their work and began to pace the room backwards and forwards, up and down, as often with the candles extinguished for economy's sake as not. Their figures glancing into the fire-light and out into the shadow perpetually. At this time they talked over past cares and troubles, they planned for the future and consulted each other as to their plans. In after-years this was the time for discussing together the plots of their novels and again, still later this was the time for the last surviving sister to walk alone from old accustomed habit round and round the desolate room thinking sadly upon the days that were no more. But this Christmas of 1836 was not without its hopes in daring aspirations. They had tried their hands at story-writing in the Aminiature magazine long ago. They all of them made out perpetually. They had likewise attempted to write poetry and had a modest confidence that they had achieved a tolerable success. But they knew that they might deceive themselves and that sister's judgments of each other's productions were likely to be too partial to be depended upon. So Charlotte, as the eldest, resolved to write to Salvi. I believe, from an expression in a letter to be noticed hereafter, that she also consulted Colleridge. But I have not met with any part of that correspondence. On December 29th her letter to Salvi was dispatched and from an excitement not unnatural in a girl who has worked herself up to the pitch of writing to a poet laureate and asking his opinion of her poems she used some high-flown expressions which probably gave him the idea that she was a romantic young lady unacquainted with the realities of life. This most likely was the first of those adventurous letters that passed through the little post-office of Hayworth. Morning after morning of the holiday slipped away and there was no answer. The sisters had to leave home and Emily to return to her distasteful duties without knowing even whether Charlotte's letter had ever reached its destination. Not dispirited, however, by the delay Branwell determined to try a similar venture and addressed the following letter to Wordsworth. It was given by the poet to Mr. Quillenin in 1850 after the name of Bronte had become known and famous. I have no means of ascertaining what answer was returned by Mr. Wordsworth, but that he considered the letter remarkable may I think be inferred both from its preservation and its recurrence to his memory when the real name of Currer Bell was made known to the public. Hayworth, near Bradford, Yorkshire, January 19th, 1837 Sir, I most earnestly entreat you to read and pass your judgment upon what I have sent you because from the day of my birth to this, the nineteenth year of my life, I have lived among secluded hills where I could neither know what I was or what I could do. I read for the same reason that I ate or drank because it was a real craving of nature. I wrote on the same principle as I spoke out of the impulse and feelings of the mind, nor could I help it for what came, came out and there was the end of it. For as to self-conceit that could not receive food from flattery since to this hour not half a dozen people in the world know that I have ever penned a line. But a change has taken place now, sir, and I am arrived at an age wherein I must do something for myself. The powers I possess must be exercised to a definite end and as I don't know them myself I must ask of others what they are worth. Yet there is not one here to tell me, and still if they are worthless, time will henceforth be too precious to be wasted on them. Do pardon me, sir, that I have ventured for one whose works I have most loved in our literature and who most has been with me a divinity of the mind, laying before him one of my writings and asking of him a judgment of its contents. I must come before someone from whose sentence there is no appeal and such one is he who has developed the theory of poetry as well as its practice and both in such a way as to claim a place in the memory of a thousand years to come. My aim, sir, is to push out into the open world and for this I trust not poetry alone that might launch the vessel but could not bear her on. Sensible and scientific prose bold and vigorous efforts in my walk in life would give a father title to the notice of the world and then again poetry ought to brighten and crown that name with glory but nothing of all this can be ever begun without means and as I don't possess these I must in every shape strive to gain them. Surely in this day when there is not a writing poet worth his six pence the field must be open if a better man can step forward. What I send you is the prefatory scene of a much longer subject in which I have striven to develop strong passions and weak principles struggling with a high imagination and acute feelings till as youth at its age, evil deeds and short enjoyments end in mental misery and bodily ruin. Now to send you the whole of this would be a mock upon your patience. What you see does not even pretend to be more than the description of an imaginative child but read it, sir, and as you would hold a light to one and utter darkness as you value your own kind heartedness return me an answer if but one word may be whether I should write on or write no more. Forgive undue warmth because my feelings in this matter cannot be cool and believe me, sir, with deep respect your really humble servant P. B. Bronte. End of Chapter 8 Volume 1 Chapter 8 of The Life of Charlotte Bronte This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org The Life of Charlotte Bronte by Elizabeth Clegghorn Gaskell Volume 1 Chapter 8 The poetry enclosed seems to me by no means equal to parts of the letter but as everyone likes to judge for himself I copy the six opening stanzas about a third of the whole and certainly not the worst. So where he reigns in glory bright above those starry skies of night amid his paradise of light oh why may I not be. Oft when awake on Christmas morn in sleepless twilight laid forlorn strange thoughts have o'er my head been born how he has died for me and oft within my chamber lying have I awakened myself with crying from dreams where I beheld him dying upon the accursed tree and often has my mother said while on her lap I laid my head she feared for time I was not made but for eternity so I can read my title clear to mansions in the skies and let me bid farewell to fear and wipe my weeping eyes I'll lay me down on this marble stone and set the world aside to see upon her ebb and throne the moon in glory ride Soon after Charlotte returned to Dewsbury moor she was distressed by a hearing that her friend was the neighborhood for a considerable length of time February 20th What shall I do without you how long are we likely to be separated why are we to be denied each other's society it is an inscrutable fatality I long to be with you because it seems as if two or three days or weeks spent in your company would beyond measure strengthen me in the enjoyment of those feelings which I have so lately began to cherish to me that way in which I am so feebly endeavoring to travel and now I cannot keep you by my side I must proceed sorrowfully alone Why are we to be divided surely it must be because we're in danger of loving each other too well of losing sight of the creator and idolatry of the creature at first I could not say I will be done I felt rebellious but I knew it was wrong to feel so being left a moment alone this morning I prayed fervently to be enabled to resign myself to every decree of God's will though it should be dealt forth by a far severe hand than the present disappointment since then I felt calmer and humbler and consequently happier last Sunday I took up my Bible in a gloomy state of mind I began to read a feeling stole over me such as I have not known for many long years a sweet placid sensation like those I remember which used to visit me when I was a little child and on Sunday evenings in the summer stood by the open window reading the life of a certain French nobleman who attained a pure and higher degree of sanctity than has been known since the days of the early martyrs E's residence was equally within a walk from Dewsbury more as it had been from Rowhead and on Saturday afternoons both Mary and she used to call upon Charlotte and often endeavored to persuade her to return with them and be the guest of one of them till Monday morning but this was comparatively seldom Mary says she visited us twice or thrice when she was at Mrs. W's we used to dispute about politics and religion she a Tory and clergyman's daughter was always in a minority of one in our house of violent dissent and radicalism she used to hear over again delivered with authority all the lectures I had been used to give her at school on despotic aristocracy mercenary priesthood etc she had not energy to defend herself sometimes she owed to a little truth in it but generally said nothing her feeble health gave her her yielding manner for she could never oppose anyone without gathering up all her strength for the struggle thus she would let me advise and patronize most imperiously sometimes picking out any grain of sense there might be in what I said but never allowing anyone material early to interfere with her independence of thought and action though her silence was sometimes left one under the impression that she agreed when she did not she never gave a flattering opinion and thus her words were golden whether for praise or blame Mary's father was a man of remarkable intelligence but of strong not to say violent prejudices all running for a number of republicanism and dissent no other county but Yorkshire could have produced such a man his brother had been a detonue in France and had afterwards voluntarily taking up his residence there Mr. T. himself had been much abroad both on business and to see the great continental galleries of paintings he spoke French perfectly I've been told when need was but delighted usually in talking the broadest Yorkshire he bought splendid engravings of the pictures which he particularly admired and his house was full of works of art and of books but he rather like to present his rough side to any stranger or newcomer he would speak his broadest bring out his opinions on church and state in their most startling forms and by and by if he found his here could stand the shock he would involuntarily show his warm kind heart and his true taste and real refinement his family of four sons and two daughters were brought up on republican principles independence of thought and action were encouraged no shams tolerated they are scattered far and wide Martha the younger daughter sleeps in the Protestant cemetery at Brussels Mary is in New Zealand Mr. T. is dead and so life and death have dispersed the circle of violent radicals and dissenters into which twenty years ago the little quiet resolute clergyman's daughter was received and by whom she was truly loved and honoured January and February of 1837 had passed away and still there was no reply from Selvi probably she had lost expectation and almost hope when at length in the beginning of March she received the letter inserted in Mr. C. C. Selvi's life of his father volume 4 page 327 after accounting for his delay and replying to hers by the fact of a long absence from home during which his letters had accumulated whence it has lain unanswered till the last of a numerous file not from disrespect or indifference to its contents but because in truth it is not an easy task to answer it nor a pleasant one to cast a damp over the high spirits and the generous desires of youth he goes on to say what you are I can only infer from your letter which appears to be written in sincerity though I may suspect that you have used a fictitious signature be that as it may the letter and the verses bear the same stamp and I can well understand the state of mind they indicate it is not my advice that you have asked as to the direction of your talents but my opinion of them and yet the opinion may be worth little and the advice much you evidently possess and in no inconsiderable degree what Wordsworth calls the faculty of verse I am not depreciating it when I say that in these times it is not rare many volumes of poems are now published every year without attracting public attention any one of which if it had appeared half a century ago would have obtained a high reputation for its author whoever therefore is ambitious of distinction in this way ought to be prepared for disappointment but it is not with a view to distinction you should cultivate this talent if you consult your own happiness I who have made literature my profession and devoted my life to it and have never for a moment repented of the deliberate choice think to myself nevertheless bound in duty to caution every young man who applies as an aspirant to me for encouragement and vice against taking so perilous a course you will say that a woman has no need of such a caution there can be no peril in it for her in a certain sense this is true but there is a danger of which I would with all kindness and all earnestness warn you the daydreams in which you habitually indulge are likely to induce a distempered state of mind and in proportion as all the ordinary uses of the world seem to you flat and unprofitable you will be unfitted for them without becoming fitted for anything else literature cannot be the business of a woman's life and it ought not to be the more she is engaged in her proper duties the less leisure will she have for it even as an accomplishment and a recreation to those duties you have not yet been called and when you are you will be less eager for celebrity you will not seek in imagination for excitement of which the vicitudes of this life and the anxieties from which you must not hope to be exempted be your state what it will bring with them but too much but do not suppose that I disparage the gift which you possess nor that I would discourage you from exercising it I only exhort you so to think of it and so to use it as to render it conducive to your own permanent good write poetry for its own sake not in a spirit of emulation and not with view to celebrity the less you aim at that the more likely you will be to deserve and finally to obtain it so written it is wholesome both for the heart and soul it may be made the surest means next to religion of soothing the mind and elevating it you may embody it in your best thoughts and your wisest feelings and in so doing discipline and strengthen them farewell madame it is not because I have forgotten that I was once young myself that I write to you in this strain but because I remember it you will neither doubt my sincerity nor my good will and however ill what has here been said may accord with your present views and temper the longer you live the more reasonable I will appear to you though I may be but an ungracious advisor you will allow me therefore to subscribe myself with the best wishes for your happiness here and hereafter your true friend Robert Mr. Southey I was with Miss Bronte when she received Miss Cuthbert Southey's note requesting her permission to insert the foregoing letter in his father's life she said to me Mr. Southey's letter was kind and admirable a little stringent but it did me good it is partly because I think it's so admirable and partly because it tends to bring out her character as shown in the following reply that I have taken the liberty of inserting the foregoing extracts from it March 16th I cannot rest till I have answered your letter even though by addressing you a second time I should appear a little intrusive but I must thank you for the kind and wise advice you have condescended to give me I have not ventured to hope for such a reply so considerate in its tone so noble in its spirit I must suppress what I feel or you will think me foolishly enthusiastic at the first perusal of your letter I felt only regret that I had ever ventured to trouble you with my crude rhapsody I felt a painful heat rise to my face when I thought of the choirs of paper I had covered with what once gave me so much delight but which now was only a source of confusion but after I had thought a little and read it again and again the prospect seemed to clear you do not forbid me to write you do not say that what I write is utterly destitute of merit you only warn me against the folly of neglecting real duties for the sake of imaginative pleasures of writing for the love of fame for the selfish excitement of emulation you kindly allow me to write poetry for its own sake provided I leave undone nothing which I ought to do in order to pursue that single absorbing exquisite gratification I am afraid sir you think me very foolish I know the first letter I wrote to you was all senseless trash from beginning to end but I am not altogether the idle dreaming being it would seem to denote my father is a clergyman of limited though competent income and I am the eldest of his children he expended quite as much in my education as he could afford injustice to the rest I thought it therefore my duty when I left school to become a governess in that capacity I find enough to occupy my thoughts all day long and my head enhanced too without having a moments time for one dream of the imagination in the evenings I confess I do think but I never trouble anyone else with my thoughts I carefully avoid any appearance of preoccupation and eccentricity which might lead those I live amongst to suspect the nature of my pursuits following my father's advice who from my child has had counseled me just in the wise and friendly tone of your letter I have endeavored not only attentively to observe all the duties a woman ought to fulfill but to feel deeply interested in them I don't always succeed for sometimes when I'm teaching or sewing I would rather be reading or writing but I try to deny myself and my father's approbation amply rewarded me for the privation once more allow me to thank you with sincere gratitude I trust I shall never more feel ambitious to see my name in print if the wish should rise I'll look at Southie's letter and suppress it it is honour enough for me that I have written to him and received an answer that letter is consecrated no one shall ever see it but papa and my brother and sisters again I thank you this incident I suppose will be renewed no more if I live to be an old woman I shall remember it 30 years hence as a bright dream the signature which you suspected of being fictitious is my real name again therefore I must sign myself P.S. Pricer excuse me for writing to you a second time I could not help writing partly to tell you how thankful I am for your kindness and partly to let you know that your advice shall not be wasted however sorrowfully and reluctantly it may be at first followed C.B. I cannot deny myself the gratification of inserting so these reply Keswick March 22nd 1837 Dear Madame honour has given me great pleasure and I should not forgive myself if I did not tell you so you have received admonition as considerately and as kindly as it was given let me now request that if you ever should come to these lakes while I am living here you will let me see you you would then think of me afterwards with the more goodwill because you would perceive that there is neither severity nor morose-ness in the state of mind to which years it is by God's mercy in our power to attain a degree of self-government which is essential to our own happiness and contributes greatly to that of those around us take care of over-excitement and endeavor to keep a quiet mind even for your health it is the best advice that can be given to you your moral and spiritual improvement will then keep pace with the culture of your intellectual powers and now Madame, God bless you farewell and believe me to be your sincere friend, Robert Southey of this second letter also she spoke and told me that it contained an invitation for her to go and see the poet if ever she visited the lakes but there was no money to spare, she said nor any prospect of my ever earning money enough to have the chance of so great a pleasure so I gave up thinking of it at the time we conversed together on the subject we were at the lakes but Southey was dead a stringent letter made her put aside for a time any idea of literary enterprise she bent her whole energy towards the fulfillment of her duties in hand but her occupation was not sufficient food for her great forces of intellect and they cried out perpetually give, give, while the comparatively less breezy air of Dewsbury Moore told her upon her health and spirits more and more on August 27th, 1837 she writes Dewsbury, engaged in the old business teach, teach, teach when will you come home? make haste you have been at bath long enough for all purposes by this time you have acquired polish enough I'm sure if the varnish is laid on much thicker I'm afraid the good wood underneath will be quite concealed and your Yorkshire friends won't stand that come, come, I'm getting really tired of your absence Saturday after Saturday comes around and I can have no hope of hearing you're knock at the door and then being told that Miss E has come oh dear, in this monotonous life of mine that was a pleasant event I wish it were recur again but it will take two or three interviews before the stiffness, the estrangement of this long separation will wear away about this time she forgot to return a work bag she had borrowed by a messenger and in repairing her error she says these aberrations of memory warn me pretty intelligibly that I am getting past my prime and the same tone of despondency runs through the following letter I wish exceedingly that I could come to you before Christmas but it is impossible another three weeks must elapse before I shall again have my comforter beside me under the roof of my own dear quiet home if I could always live with you and daily read the Bible with you if your lips and mine could at the same time drink the same draft from the same pure fountain of mercy I hope I trust I might one day become better far better than my evil wandering thoughts my corrupt heart, cold to the spirit and warm to the flesh will now permit me to be I often plan the pleasant life which we might lead together strengthening each other in that power of self-denial that hallowed and glowing devotion with the first saints of God often attained to my eyes fill with tears when I contrast the bliss of such a state brightened by hopes of the future with the melancholy state I now live in uncertain that I ever felt true contrition wandering in thought and deed longing for holiness which I shall never, never obtain smitten at times to the heart with the conviction that ghastly Calvinistic doctrines are true darkened in short by the very shadows of spiritual death if Christian perfection be necessary to salvation I shall never be saved my heart is a very hot bed for sinful thoughts and when I decide on an action I scarcely remember to look to my redeemer for a direction I know not how to pray I cannot bend my life to the grand end of doing good I go on constantly seeking my own pleasure pursuing the gratification of my own desires I forget God and will not God forget me in the meantime I know the greatness of Jehovah I acknowledge the perfection of his word I adore the purity of the Christian faith my theory is right my practice horribly wrong the Christmas holidays came and she and Anne returned to the parsonage and to that happy home circle in which alone their natures expanded amongst all other people they shriveled up more or less indeed there were only one or two strangers who could be admitted among the sisters without producing the same result Emily and Anne were bound up in their lives in interests like twins the former from reserve, the latter from timidity avoided all friendships and intimacies beyond their family Emily was impervious to influence she never came in contact with public opinion and her own decision of what was right and fitting was a law for her conduct and appearance with which she allowed no one to interfere her love was poured out on Anne as Charlotte's was on her but the affection among all three was stronger than either death or life E was eagerly welcomed by Charlotte freely admitted by Emily and kindly received by Anne whenever she could visit them and this Christmas she had promised to do so but her coming had to be delayed on account of a little domestic accident detailed in the following letter December 29th, 1837 I'm sure you will have thought me very remiss in not sending my promise letter long before now but I have a sufficient and very melancholy excuse in an accident that befell our old faithful Tabby a few days after my return home she was gone out into the village on some errand when as she was descending the steep street her foot slipped on the ice and she fell it was dark and no one saw her miss chance till after a time her groans attracted the attention of a passerby she was lifted up and carried into the druggists near and after the examination it was discovered that she had completely shattered and dislocated one leg unfortunately the fracture cannot be set till six o'clock the next morning as no surgeon was to be had before that time and she now lies at our house in a very doubtful and dangerous state of course we are all exceedingly distressed at the circumstance for she was like one of our own family since the event we have been almost without assistance a person has dropped in now and then to do the drudgery but we have as yet been able to procure no regular servant and consequently the whole work of the house as well as the additional duty of nursing Tabby falls on ourselves under these circumstances I dare not press your visit here at least until she is pronounced out of danger it would be too selfish of me and wish me to give you this information before but papa and all the rest were anxious I should delay until we saw whether matters took a more settled aspect and I myself kept putting it off from day to day most bitterly reluctant to give up all the pleasure I had anticipated so long however remembering what you told me namely that you had commended the matter to a higher decision than ours and that you were resolved to submit with resignation to that decision however it might be I hold it my duty to yield also and to be silent and may be all for the best I fear if you had been here during this severe weather your visit would have been of no advantage to you for the moors are blockaded with snow and you would never have been able to get out after this disappointment I never dare reckon with certainty on the enjoyment of a pleasure again it seems as if some fatality stood between you and me I am not good enough for you and you must be kept from the contamination of too intimate society I would urge your visit yet I would entreat and press it but the thought comes across me should tabby die while you're in the house I should never forgive myself no it must not be and in a thousand ways the consciousness of that mortifies and disappoints me most keenly and I am not the only one who is disappointed all in the house were looking to your visit with eagerness papa says he highly approves of my friendship with you and he wishes me to continue it through life a good neighbor of the Brontes a clever intelligent Yorkshire woman who keeps a drug as shop in Haworth from her occupation her experience in excellent sense holds the position of village doctoris and nurse and as such has been a friend in many a time of trial and sickness and death in the house holds round a futuristic little incident connected with tabby's fractured leg Mr. Bronte is truly generous and regardful of all deserving claims tabby had lived with them for 10 or 12 years and was as Charlotte expressed it one of the family but on the other hand she was past the age of any very active service being nearer 70 than 60 and at the time of the accident she had a sister living in the village and the savings she had accumulated this form to competency for one in her rank of life or if in this time of sickness she fell short of any comforts which her state rendered necessary the parsonage should supply them so reasoned Miss Branwell the prudent not to say anxious ant looked to the limited contents of Mr. Bronte's purse and the unprovided for future of her nieces who were moreover losing the relaxation of the holidays in close attendance upon tabby Miss Branwell urged her views upon Mr. Bronte as soon as the immediate danger to the old servant's life was over he refused at first to listen to the careful advice it was repugnant to his liberal nature but Miss Branwell persevered urged economical motives pressed on his love for his daughters he gave way tabby was to be removed to her sisters and they are nursed and cared for Mr. Bronte coming in with his aid when her own resources fell short this decision was communicated to the girls there were symptoms of a quiet but sturdy rebellion that winter afternoon in the small precincts of Hawthworth parsonage they made one unanimous and stiff remonstrance tabby had tended them in their childhood they and none other should tend her in her infirmity and age at tea time they were sad and silent and the meal went away untouched by any of the three though it was at breakfast they did not waste many words on the subject but each word they did utter was weighty they struck eating till the resolution was rescinded and tabby was allowed to remain a helpless invalid entirely dependent upon them herein was the strong feeling of duty being paramount to pleasure which lay at the foundation of Charlotte's character made most apparent for we have seen how she yearned for her friend's company but it was to be obtained only by shrinking from what she esteemed right and that she never did whatever might be the sacrifice she had another weight on her mind this Christmas I have said that the air of doosbury moor did not agree with her though she herself was hardly aware how much her life there was affecting her health but Anne had begun to suffer just before the holidays and Charlotte watched over her younger sisters with the jealous vigilance of some wild creature that changes her very nature if danger threatens her young Anne had a slight cough a pain at her side a difficulty of breathing Miss W considered it as little more than a common cold but Charlotte felt every indication of incipient consumption as a stab at her heart remembering Maria and Elizabeth whose places once knew them and should know them no more stung by anxiety for this little sister she operated Miss W for her fancied indifference to Anne's state of health Miss W felt these reproaches keenly and wrote to Mr. Bronte about them he immediately replied most kindly expressing his fear that Charlotte's apprehensions and anxieties respecting her sister had led her to give utterance to overexcited expressions of alarm through Miss W's kind consideration Anne was a year longer at school than her friends intended at the close of the half year Miss W sought for the opportunity of an explanation of each other's words and the issue proved that falling out of faithful friends renewing is of love and so ended the first, last and only difference Charlotte ever had with good kind Miss W still her heart had received a shock in the perception of Anne's delicacy and all these holidays she watched over her with the longing, fond anxiety which is so full of sudden pangs of fear Emily had given up her situation in the Halifax school at the expiration of six months of arduous trial on account of her health which could only be re-established by the bracing moorland, air and free life of home Tabby's illness had preyed on the family resources I doubt whether Branwell was maintaining himself at this time for some unexplained reason he had given up the idea of becoming a student of painting at the Royal Academy all aspects in life were uncertain and had yet to be settled so Charlotte had quietly to take up her burden of teaching again and return to her previous, monotonous life