1857.]

THREE and thirty years ago-it

is only forty-one this twentyfirst day of April, A.D. 1857, since Charlotte Brontë was born-a party of children are gathered round the kitchen fire in the old-fashioned parsonage of Haworth. There are four of them, Charlotte, Emily, Anne, Bramwell,-a brother and three sisters. Two older ones were among the rest last autumn, but they lie with their mother now in the churchyard outside. How the eldest died may be gathered from a few branding pages in Jane Eyre. The child was killed by cruel neglect, and though the little martyr never bore malice to any living creature in her life, her death has been bitterly avenged.

The village of Haworth lies high among the Yorkshire uplands, and the parsonage looks down upon the village. There are no trees, little vegetation of any kind, a few stunted bushes and shrubs in front of the house; behind, right up to the kitchen door, a wide expanse of bleak and melancholy moor.

For

weeks together, in winter, the inmates are blockaded by the snow which the north wind brings down from the hills. But the old church is not a stone's-cast across the tombstones, so that service on Sundays is seldom missed by the little dwellers in the parsonage. The members of the congregation are imprisoned in narrow castellated pews, on which the names of the proprietors are painted in white letters, as they are painted on coffins. There is now, 1857, a square tablet inserted in the wall, 'to the memory of Charlotte Brontë.'

The Rev. Patrick Brontë, who has come all the way from Ireland to plant himself finally in this hopeful district, is the incumbent -a strict, honourable, conscientious man. There is still a dash of the wild Irishman in him, notwithstanding his Cambridge education and sacred calling: so that when angry or annoyed, he works off his volcanic wrath by firing pistols in rapid succession out of the backdoor,' which opens luckily upon the

moors, across which no one travels except the itinerant packmen who come from the unknown country on the other side of the hills. His parishioners are a rough, lawless, and kindly set, with the shrewd sagacity and blunt address of men born and bred in the West Riding.

The children, with the ruddy firelight lighting up their faces, form a curious group. None of them are very good-looking, except the brother. Of the sisters, Emily is the prettiest.' Charlotte is plain, and very diminutive; to compensate for these disadvantages, her hair is soft, thick, and brown, and her eyes emit a wonderful light-vivid and radiant. 'I never saw the like,' Mrs. Gaskell says, 'in any other human creature.' She is very shortsighted, however, though her friends accuse her of being able to see, like a cat, in the dark; and she constructs hieroglyphics so minute that they cannot be read now without a microscope. They must write so in Lilliput, if they write at all there.

The father is occupied with the duties of his parish, and as there is no society in the neighbourhood the children are left very much to themselves and Tabby,' the old Yorkshire serving-woman. They are grave, quiet, considerate. They never play riotously, as children do play, and ought to play. The elder sedulously watch the young ones, and nurse them in a grave, motherly way, which reminds us of certain charming sketches in Leech's portfolio. But from the youngest up to Charlotte, they are all sedate and precocious. They write plays and act them. They publish a magazine for themselves every month; and they give, as Blackwood used to do in those days, a double number for December.' Charlotte's favourite hero is the Duke of Wellington. He and his sons, the Marquis of Douro and Lord Charles Wellesley, appear in a hundred romances which she wrote in those invisible microscopic characters before she was fourteen. The little creatures are fierce politicians-Tories to the backbone, every one of them. They read the

6

John Bull and Blackwood's Magazine. The editor,' says Charlotte, solemnly, in a paper written at the time, is Mr. Christopher North, an old man, seventy-four years of age; the first of April is his birthday: his company are Timothy Tickler, Morgan O'Doherty, Macrabin Mordecai, and James Hogg, a man of most extraordinary genius, a Scottish shepherd. One of their plays is entitled The Islanders. In it each of the children takes possession of a favourite island, and selects 'chief men' to carry on the government. 'Bramwell,' is Charlotte's contemporary account, chose John Bull, Astley Cooper, and Leigh Hunt; Emily, Walter Scott, Mr. Lockhart, Johnny Lockhart; Anne, Michael Sadler, Lord Bentinck, and Sir Henry Halford. I chose the Duke of Wellington and two sons, Christopher North and Co., and Mr. Abernethy.' Little sister Annie, who is seven, and has to be lifted upon her chair, chooses Sir Henry Halford and Mr. Sadler!

A strange childhood!-out of which, through various schools and other harsh experiences, the Brontës grew up to man and woman's estate, and which explains a good deal in their subsequent history. They are the offspring of the moors; and after the sea-whose authority is supreme-the moorland has perhaps the strongest influence in forming and determining the character. All their lives the Brontës love these moors intensely. They look down from their bleak hills of Judea,' and wonder how the dwellers contrive to exist in the Philistine flats' beneath. The turbid waters of their 'beck' are more sacred than the Jordan's. In dreams, at Brussels they hear the Haworth harebells rustle in the wind. Emily cannot live away from them. She pines and sickens, and would die if she were not brought back and restored to their wild companionship. Every thing they say or write is consecrated by this bleak communion. Their honey has the taste of the heath. The scent of the heather is as clearly traceable in their works as the smack of the salt sea in the architecture of the lagoons.

After passing through much uncongenial drudgery as teachers, both at home and on the Continent,

the sisters, in 1844, find themselves once more united in the quiet home among the hills. Throughout the intervening period, Charlotte has been silently amassing materials for future work. Nothing comes amiss to that observant and inventive brain. She notices every one with whom she is brought into contactdissects and analyses. The result is, that when she begins to write, her life is transcribed into her novels. The one is a daguerrotype of the other. The scenes reviewers condemn as exaggerated, the characters they pronounce unnatural, are taken from personal experience. When you read her life, you read Jane Eyre, Shirley, Villette, in fragments. The separate parts have simply to be taken out, arranged, riveted together, and you have the romance. But what in the life is fragmentary and incomplete-for we live bit by bit, and never contrive to act out our play uninterruptedly at one sitting is by the artist's insight cast into dramatic sequence. In one of her letters, Miss Brontë describes the way in which she moulds her experience into fiction :

You are not to suppose that any of the characters are literal portraits. It would not suit the rules of art, nor of my own feelings, to write in that style. We only suffer reality to suggest, never to dictate. The heroines are abstractions, and the heroes too. Qualities I have seen, loved, and admired, are here and there put in as decorative gems, to be preserved in that setting.

But no explanation can ever be quite exhaustive. The experience can never entirely explain the work. For between lies the mystery of Genius.

What Charlotte is when she returns from the Brussels pension, she remains till her death. Very small of stature-when ordering any piece of dress she has to give special instructions, 'the full woman's size not suiting me;' very quiet, shy, and diffident; very resolute when a duty has to be performed; very timid when happiness has to be encountered or success enjoyed. Her physical constitution is miserably weak and sensitive, but her will is perfect. She is never exacting, never sanguine, never disappointed when people fail her. From her earliest years she has schooled her

liberty thrills their blood, and the wild gladness of a Bacchante sparkles in their eyes:

I'd die when all the foam is up, The bright wine sparkling high, Nor wait till in the exhausted cup Life's dull dregs only lie. There is the martyr's spirit, but there is the hero's too. They will not love nor hate over-much: but the throbbing of the wounded heart cannot be always restrained, and at times they are intensely bitter :

They named him mad and laid his bones Where holier ashes lie,

But doubt not that his spirit groans

In hell's eternity.

There are indications in Currer's contributions of that amazing intellectual force which a year afterwards was to move painfully every English heart: but as yet she has not learnt her strength. Her steps are restrained and embarrassed. She does not move freely. She touches life with the tips of her fingers, so to speak: her whole heart and soul have not yet been cast into her work.

Yet most of the subjects are strangely chosen for girls, and such as a very marked and decided idioscyncrasy alone would have selected. In Acton's, indeed, there is more of the ordinary woman, mild, patient, devout, loving; and her poetry has little to distinguish it from the poetry of many women who acquire the faculty of verse.' But those of the other two are very different. In them there is none of the ordinary romance of girlhood. Their heroes are not the heroes of the ball-room, but of the covenant and the stake,-the warrior priest who can die for his faith; the patriot who, if it be for his country's gain, will steadfastly allow his honour to be soiled, and

the worker who in his loneliness
achieves the redemption of his
people; the martyr with the thorny
erown upon his brow, but with the
peace of God and the hope of
Success,
immortality in his heart.
the usual gauge applied by youth,
is not with them the test of worth;

The long war closing in defeat,
Defeat serenely borne,

is in their eyes the noblest fate that
So
can be reserved for any man.
they do not pray for happiness, but
for
and
inward control,
the
patience which endures to the end.
Of God alone, and self-reliance,

I ask for solace,-hope for aid. Praise, fame, friendship, the good word of the world, they do not covet; they can live without them; nay, resign them cheerfully if need be.

There's such a thing as dwelling

On the thought ourselves have nursed, And with scorn and courage telling The world to do its worst.

And these are the feelings expressed, not by strong men, but by two delicate women in their girlhood! The stern spirit of their northern hills and of the bleak Yorkshire moorland haunted their birthplace, and must have entered early into their souls.

Yet the book does not altogether lack the gentler graces of poetry. In the concise realism of Currer there is little indeed of that abstract and ethereal spirit men call the imagination; but it inspires the wild and plaintive music of many of Ellis's songs. Some of these are so perfect that we cannot understand why they are not widely known; certainly modern poetry has produced few lyrics more felicitous either in sentiment orexpression than 'Remembrance.' How quaint and composed, and yet how plaintive, it is! The bereaved speaks calmly, but there is a passion of tears below: