Page:Life and Works of the Sisters Bronte - Volume I.djvu/25

 madness rises in the heart of our race. The "realm of faery," the most beautiful on earth, is our domain.' Idealism, un- derstood as a life-long discontent ; passion, conceived as an inner thirst and longing that wears and kills more often than it makes happy ; a love of home and kindred entwined with the very roots of life, so that home-sickness may easily ex- haust and threaten life ; an art directed rather to expression than to form ragged often and broken, but always poignant, always suggestive, touched with reverie and emotion ; who does not recognize in these qualities, these essentially Celtic qualities, the qualities of the Brontes ?

Take this passage from Charlotte's letter to Miss Nussey, announcing Emily's death :

The anguish of seeing her suffer is over ; the spectacle of the pains of death is gone by ; the funeral day is past. We feel she is at peace. No need now to tremble for the hard frost and the keen wind. Emily does not feel them. She died in a time of promise. We saw her taken from life in its prime.

Or, again:

I cannot forget Emily's death-day. It was very terrible. She was torn, conscious, panting, reluctant, though resolute, out of a happy life.

Or, take the well-known outburst in 'Shirley,' where Char- lotte, writing in the desolate Haworth home after her sisters' deaths, turns from the description of Jessy Yorke, to think of Martha Taylor, Jessy Yorke's original, and of Martha's burial- day in Brussels :-

But, Jessy, I will write about you no more. This is an autumn evening, wet and wild. There is only one cloud in the sky ; but it curtains it from pole to pole. The wind cannot rest ; it hur- ries, sobbing, over hills of sullen outline, colourless with twilight and mist. Rain has beat all day on that church tower--

[ one thinks of her, lifting her eyes from her small writing, as she looks down the bare strip of garden to Haworth Church --] ;