Page:A note on Charlotte Brontë (IA note00swinoncharlottebrich).pdf/109

 marriage and her death; a precious fragment to which the few and fine words of introduction prefixed by the illustrious writer who had been the peculiar god of her inmost idolatry have always seemed to me worthy of special remembrance among the truest and the noblest, the manliest and the kindliest lines that ever came from the pen of Mr. Thackeray. It is a coincidence as memorable as it is deplorable that so many of the best and greatest who have died within the reach of our recollection should have left, like these, some splendid and broken sample of their highest workmanship unfinished for the admiration and the craving and the fruitless passionate regret of aftertime; even as Shakespeare himself left behind him the two colossal fragments that a hand in the one