Page:Life and Works of the Sisters Bronte - Volume I.djvu/26

 it rises dark from the stony enclosure of its graveyard ; the nettles, the long grass, and the tombs all drip with wet. This evening reminds me too forcibly of another evening some years ago: a howling, rainy, autumn evening, too, when certain who had that day performed a pilgrimage to a grave new- made in a heretic cemetery, sat near a wood fire on the hearth of a foreign dwelling. They were merry and social, but they each knew that a gap, never to be filled, had been made in their circle. They knew they had lost something whose absence could never be quite atoned for, so long as they lived ; and they knew that heavy falling rain was soaking into the wet earth which covered their lost darling; and that the sad, sighing gale was mourning above her buried head. The fire warmed them ; Life and Friendship yet blessed them : but Jessy lay cold, coffined, solitary only the sod screening her from the storm.

These passages surely have the Celtic quality, if ever writ- ing had. Rapid, yearning, broken speech ! there is no note more penetrating in our literature.

Then, as to the Celtic pride, the Celtic shyness, the Celtic endurance, Charlotte Bronte was rich in them all. Her nature loves to give recoils from gifts. She will owe noth- ing to anyone ; she half enjoys, half dislikes, the kindnesses even of her friendly and considerate publisher ; and in society she will neither be exhibited nor patronised. Nor will she submit her judgment or taste ; she will swear to no man's words. Nothing is more curious than to mark the resolute, and even haughty, independence with which the little coun- trywoman approached for the first time the literary world and the celebrities of London. She breaks her shy silence at a dinner-table crowded with Macready worshippers to denounce Macready's acting ; when Thackeray comes to see her for the first time, she herself says, ' The giant sate before me ; I was moved to speak to him of some of his shortcomings (literary, of course) ; one by one the faults came into my head, and one by one I brought them out and sought some explanation or defence ;' so that Mr. Smith, sitting by, may well describe it as ' a queer scene.' She will have nothing to say to Miss Barrett's poetry ; and when she returns to Haworth, she says, with a touch of quiet and confident scorn,