derlies the whole wild harmony. Never, perhaps, has unbridled ferocity and unassuageable vindictiveness found so adequate a delineator as in this young girl. If her book have any moral, it serves, as we before observed, to show how fierce, how inhuman a passion personal attachment to another may become, and how reckless of the welfare of its object; and this, too, not the love which sinks from the human level into the sensual appetite of the brutes, but the pure love of souls. For such is the passion of Heathcliff and Catherine. The life-like presentation of how such a love may be compatible with selfishness utterly unredeemed is, if not the conscious teaching of the author, yet the prominent lesson of her rude titanic story, "rich with barbaric gems and crusted gold."

The only other evidence which Emily Brontë has left of her remarkable genius, is to be found in her few short poems, for which Charlotte justly claimed an appreciation that they have never obtained. They show a scarcely less forcible and a finer side of her nature than Wuthering Heights. They want the finish of an accomplished writer; but they have a true music of their own answering to the sense. It is rarely, indeed, that poetry written early in life stands so independent as does this of any trace of the influence of other minds. But here the writer has looked with her own eyes on Nature and into her own heart (rarely, if ever, beyond these two), and with genuine simplicity and native vigour her poet's instinct gives a voice to what she has seen and experienced. The following lines breathe a softer influence than most of the poetry. Wordsworth himself might have acknowledged them.

"Often rebuked, yet always back returning

To those first feelings that were born with me,
And leaving busy chase of wealth and learning
For idle dreams of things which cannot be :

To-day I will seek not the shadowy region,

Its unsustaining vastness waxes drear;

Y

And visions rising, legion after legion,
Bring the unreal world too strangely near.
I'll walk, but not in old heroic traces,
And not in paths of high morality,
And not among the half-distinguished faces,
The clouded forms of long-past history.

I'll walk where my own nature would be leading :
It vexes me to choose another guide:
Where the gray flocks in ferny glens are feeding,
Where the wild wind blows on the mountain-side.
What have those lonely mountains worth revealing?
More glory and more grief than I can tell :
The earth, that wakes our human heart to feeling,

Can centre both the worlds of Heaven and Hell."

"Liberty," says Charlotte," was the breath of Emily's nostrils;" and there are some verses, christened "The Old Stoic," which give expression to this deep-seated impatience of restraint which lay so near the heart of the young Stoic who wrote them:

"Riches I hold in light esteem ;

And Love I laugh to scorn;
And lust of fame was but a dream
That vanished with the morn :

And if I pray, the only prayer
That moves my lips for me

Is, Leave the heart that now I bear,
And give me liberty!'

Yes, as my swift days near their goal,
'Tis all that I implore;

In life and death, a chainless soul,
With courage to endure."

There is something fine in her free undaunted spirit, her hidden tenderness, her passionate love of Nature and of home, her genius and her unconquerable fortitude. She died young, snatched away by rapid decline; and though we, who are strange to her, look on her with a sort of compelled and fearful admiration, there were passionate tears shed over her by those who associated with her in every-day life.

In less than another six months the youngest sister, Anne, followed Emily to the grave. Her death was in as marked contrast to that of her sister as her character

had been. If it be proper at all to withdraw the veil from these sad privacies of domestic life, and carry us with so much minute detail into the chamber of death, we must own that, in the present instance, it has been done with all delicacy and respect. It is a calm and tender scene, in which the pious spirit gently and patiently, and filled to the last with affectionate thoughtfulness for those she was leaving, unmoors from the shores of life and fades into the unknown sea. Anne must have had much of her Cornish mother in her. Concerning the latter, Mrs. Gaskell has been able to gather a few picturesque details, and portrays her with a sort of soft melancholy interest to our eyes. Like her, Anne was "meek and retiring, while possessing more than ordinary talents; and her piety was genuine and unobtrusive." Though gentle, she was not weak; she possessed her full share of that independence of external support which distinguished all the sisters, and her share too of their constitutional reserve. But she had an unaffected humility, and lived more in purposes entirely apart from herself than either of the others. Charlotte speaks of her life as having been passed under the tyranny of a too tender conscience, and of her religious feeling as partaking in a milder form of the sad hallucinations of Cowper. The former we can well understand; but neither her writings, nor the occasional glimpses of her life which we obtain, seem to warrant the idea that she suffered in any degree from the disease of religious melancholy. Indeed, her sister probably scarcely meant us to infer so much as this. Agnes Grey reflects so accurately all we hear of her, that we can scarcely be wrong in supposing that it shadows forth her character as well as a part of her experiences. Without wishing to seem paradoxical, we cannot help thinking that Anne had more of the artist's

faculties than either of her sisters. Her stories are much more homogeneous in their structure, her characters more consistent, and, though less original and striking, conducted with a nicer perception of dramatic propriety. Grimsby, Hattersley, and Lord Lowborough-unfilled outlines as they are—are more of real men than Heathcliff, Rochester, or Dr. John. The revolting scenes in Wildfell Hall were drawn, in despite of a natural reluctance for the task, from a sense of the duty of sparing no blackening touch in the picture of an odious vice; a mistaken duty,—as we think it (for these gross pictures of excess cannot touch those whom alone they are adapted to benefit), but in the discharge of which the writer has displayed no common powers both of insight and delineation. The hero spoils the book. Anne meant him to be a gentleman; but she was ignorant of the manners and demeanour of a gentleman, and she has given us instead a truculent ill-bred young farmer, with strong feelings, an active mind, and a most offensively good opinion of himself. Lawrence, who is meant to be the not very strong, somewhat over-refined, reserved, fine gentleman, she is not able to draw at all. She had no materials to enable her to do so.

her two sisters, differed Hers was a mind fitted

Charlotte Brontë, older than widely from them in character. to shine in society, at least as well as to write in solitude. The absolute seclusion which was to Emily a necessary, and to Anne a protection, was too often felt by Charlotte as a prison, in which the ties of affection and the claims of duty, to which none ever yielded a more loyal and unconditional obedience, alone had power to bind her. Hers was an active, eager spirit, which thirsted for knowledge and experience; which took a warm interest in the characters and actions of men, and would willingly have seen them with her own eyes, and studied them from the life. Some of her letters indicate how much it cost her willingly to immure herself within the narrow sphere which Pro

vidence had assigned her; and one of her friends has recorded a conversation which shows with how much even of horror she contemplated the narrow cell-like existence before her, and with how unfaltering a will she remained true to what she deemed, and not unjustly, to be her nearest duty, that of consoling and upholding her aged father, and of sharing with the others those gloomy trials to which the misconduct of their brother subjected them.

"When last I saw Charlotte," says one of the two most intimate friends she had," she told me she had quite decided to stay at home. She owned she did not like it. Her health was weak. She said she should like any change at first, as she had liked Brussels at first; and she thought that there must be some possibility for some people of having a life of more variety and more communion with humankind, but she saw none for her. I told her very warmly that she ought not to stay at home; that to spend the next five years at home, in solitude and weak health, would ruin her; that she would never recover it. Such a dark shadow came over her face when I said, 'Think of what you'll be five years hence,' that I stopped, and said, 'Don't cry, Charlotte!' She did not cry; but went on walking up and down the room, and said in a little while, 'But I intend to stay, Polly!'"

And she did stay: not only five, but ten years she spent, with only occasional brief absences, in that contracted home, soon rendered all but solitary by the swiftlyrepeated strokes of death; and there she died. All England is now familiar with that home; has seen, with the mind's eye at least, the plain gray-stone house, looking across the well-filled graveyard to the ancient little church at the top of the steep hill at Haworth, with the undulating wild moors, "purple-black," above and beyond it every one knows the little fireless room and the flagged kitchen in which the precocious little Brontës lived, unvisited by the dying mother or the eccentric father; and, trained to forego the usual vivacity of childhood, read their newspapers and invented their plays, with Wellington and Bonaparte for their dramatis personæ.