Page:Life and Works of the Sisters Bronte - Volume I.djvu/33

 Such identifications and researches will always have their interest, though the artist never sees as the critic sees, and is often filled with a secret amazement when he or she is led back to the scene or the person which is supposed to have furnished which did indeed furnish the germ, and the clay. The student will collect these details ; the reader will do well not to pay too much attention to them. The literary affiliations and connections of the book would be far more important and significant if one could trace them. But they are not easy to trace.

If one gathers together the information to be gleaned from Mrs. Gaskell's ' Life ' and elsewhere, as to Charlotte's book education that voracious and continuous reading to which we have many references, one may arrive at a general outline, something of this kind. There were no children's books in Haworth Parsonage. The children there were nourish- ed upon the food of their elders : the Bible, Shakspeare, Addison, Johnson, Sheridan, Cowper, for the past ; Scott, Byron, Southey, Wordsworth, Coleridge, 'Blackwood's Mag- azine,' ' Eraser's Magazine,' and Leigh Hunt for the moderns ; on a constant supply of newspapers, Whig and Tory Char- lotte once said to a friend that she had taken an interest in politics since she was five years old on current biographies, such as Lockhart's Life of Burns, Moore's Lives of Byron and Sheridan, Southey's 'Nelson,' Wolfe's 'Remains;' and on miscellaneous readings of old Methodist magazines con- taining visions and miraculous conversions, Mrs. Rowe's ' Letters from the Dead to the Living,' the ' British Essay- ists,' collected from the 'Rambler,' the 'Mirror,' and else- where, and stories from the ' Lady's Magazine.' They breathed, therefore, as far as books were concerned a brac- ing and stimulating air from the beginning. Nothing was softened or adapted for them. Before little Maria, the eldest girl, died, at the age of eleven, her father could discuss with her any current topic in which he himself was interested, as though she were grown-up and his equal.

The Duke of Wellington was their nursery-hero, and Char- lotte, a child of twelve, recorded at the time the emotions