Page:Emily Bronte (Robinson 1883).djvu/26

14 evidences of it in one to whom she had given her affections and whom she was longing to look up to in all things."

On the 29th of December, 1812, this disillusioned, loving little lady was married to Patrick Brontë, from her uncle's parsonage near Leeds. The young couple took up their abode at Hartshead, Mr. Brontë's curacy. Three years afterwards they moved, with two little baby girls, Maria and Elizabeth, to a better living at Thornton. The country round is desolate and bleak; great winds go sweeping by; young Mrs. Brontë, whose husband generally sat alone in his study, would have missed her cheerful home in sunny Penzance (being delicate and prone to superstition), but that she was a patient and uncomplaining woman, and she had scant time for thought among her many cares for the thick-coming little lives that peopled her Yorkshire home. In 1816 Charlotte Brontë was born. In the next year Patrick Branwell. In 1818 Emily Jane. In 1819 Anne. Then the health of their delicate and consumptive mother began to break. After seven years' marriage and with six young children, Mr. and Mrs. Brontë moved on the 25th of February, 1820, to their new home at Haworth Vicarage.

The village of Haworth stands, steep and grey, on the topmost side of an abrupt low hill. Such hills, more steep than high, are congregated round, circle beyond circle, to the utmost limit of the horizon. Not a wood, not a river. As far as eye can reach these treeless hills, their sides cut into fields by grey walls of stone, with here and there a grey stone village, and here and there a grey stone mill, present no other colours than the singular north-country brilliance of the green grass, and the blackish grey of the stone. Now and then a