Page:A note on Charlotte Brontë (IA note00swinoncharlottebrich).pdf/27

 forms and powers of imaginative prose, who has lately left France afresh in mourning—even George Sand herself had not this gift in like measure with those great twin sisters in genius who were born to the stern and strong-hearted old Rector of Haworth.

The gift of which I would speak is that of a power to make us feel in every nerve, at every step forward which our imagination is compelled to take under the guidance of another's, that thus and not otherwise, but in all things altogether even as we are told and shown, it was and it must have been with the human figures set before us in their action and their suffering; that thus and not otherwise they absolutely must and would have felt and thought and