Page:Life and Works of the Sisters Bronte - Volume I.djvu/29

 == III == The Irish and Celtic element in Charlotte Bronte, how- ever, is not all. Far from it. Crossing, controlling the wild impetuous temper of the Irishwoman is an influence from another world, an influence of habit and long associa- tion, breathed from Yorkshire, and the hard, frugal, persist- ent North. One has but to climb her Haworth hills to feel it flowing around one. Let it be in the winter, on some frosty white-rimed day, when the tops of the moors are lost in the cold mist, while a dim sun steals along their sides showing the great mills in the hollows, the ice -fringed streams, the bare half -poisoned woods, the rows of stone cottages, while the horse's hoofs ring sharp on the paving- stones of this Haworth Street that mounts stern and steep, without a relenting slope or zig-zag, heedless of the strained muscles of man or beast, from the busy factories below to the towered church and the little parsonage on the hill-top. The small stone houses mount with you on either hand, low, ugly, solid, without a trace of colour or ornament, the decent yet unlovely homes of a sturdy industrious race. The chim- neys pour out their smoke, the valley hums with life and toil. You stand at the top of the hill and look around you. Man- chester and the teeming Lancashire world are behind you. Bradford and Leeds in front of you. You can see nothing through the sun-lit fog, save the rolling forms of the moors bearing their dim ever-growing burden of houses ; but you know that you stand in the heart of working England, the England that goes through its labour and its play, its trade- unionism and its football, its weaving or its coal-mining, with equal vigour and tenacity, with all the English love of gain and the English thirst for success -watchful, jealous, thrift, absorbed in this very tangible earth, and the struggle to sub- due it, stained with many coarse and brutal things, scornful of the dreamer and the talker, and yet, by virtue of its very strength of striving life, its very excesses of rough force and