Page:A note on Charlotte Brontë (IA note00swinoncharlottebrich).pdf/89

 for the All-mother, bring to mind the words of her sister's friend, and the first eloquent champion of her own genius:—

I praise thee, mother earth! oh earth, my mother! Oh earth, sweet mother! gentle mother earth! Whence thou receivest what thou givest I Ask not as a child asketh not his mother, Oh earth, my mother!

No other poet's imagination could have conceived that agony of the girl who dreams she is in heaven, and weeps so bitterly for the loss of earth that the angels cast her out in anger, and she finds herself fallen on the moss and heather of the mid moor-head, and wakes herself with sobbing for joy. It is possible that to take full delight in Emily Brontë's book one must have something by natural inheritance of her instinct and something by earliest association of her