Page:The Galaxy (New York, Sheldon & Co.) Volume 24 (1877).djvu/50

 heart was terrible; but with all her sensibility, she had Spartan endurance; in such extremes, they seldom meet; the former alone, in the degree possessed by her, so wrought upon by sleepless nights, so influenced by outward agencies, would have carried her to the verge of insanity; the latter alone would have made her cold and hard; but incorporated as they were, we have Charlotte Bronte and her incomparable books.

Yet with all her capacity for suffering, who ever had a quicker instinct for enjoyment, or a finer relish? Its evidence is everywhere. What fondness for adventure! what a zest for novelty! with what eagerness she caught at all which savored of the hazardous and the daring! There was about some moods and movements of Jane, Shirley, and Lucy a kind of freedom that is refreshing, bracing as a tonic. There was no moping with Currer Bell. Some bits of conversation show a spirit emitting flashes like chain-lightning. In Jane they take the form of pungent retort; in Shirley, the swift cut of sarcasm. The humor of Miss Brontë was subtile and delicate, fine as a diamond point. She never repeats herself; and who can doubt that in her daily moods she must have been piquant and delightful? While Emily and Anne lived, in spite of anxiety and trial, there must have been many shrewd, bright talks between the wondrous three, some sparkles of nimble wit. Charlotte's was the daintiest spirit. How much of the impalpable entered into her composition, and how little of the earthy! How lightning-quick, were her perceptions, how magnetic her sympathies! A creature, Ariel-like, part of flame, or air, to elude the grasp and mock the vision!

Her actual contact with her kind was limited, her external resources scanty; but of these she made the utmost. And from her stores, what treasures she brought forth, and what a sumptuous feast she spread! If she had but a treeless moor before her, Slackened with crags, without living thing, save as a lizard crept over the stone, or a little bird flitted in the hot air, or a bee droned in the heather-bloom, she could paint a picture of such exquisite beauty that it would charm beyond a landscape of Italy.

"Nature never did betray the heart that loved her"; she restores the equipoise; she rounds off the angles; she softens many asperities; she imparts robustness, freshness, and elasticity. All this, and infinitely more, she does for those who are in sympathy with her; and of such, beyond almost any writer, was Charlotte Brontë. She never wrote of the outward world in vague phrase, or with the cant of sentiment. Her touch was as true and tender as her tints were life-like. No other books have anything approaching her word-paintings. There are delectable bits in Charles Kingsley; and Ruskin has pictures innumerable, but in such an iridescence of color that we are bewildered by them; but the fairy-small and supple fingers which pictured the moorlands around Whitcross had the skill, as enchanting as it is rare, to make them as truly visible to the eye as the things the eye actually sees; and in that loving labor they must have had bounteous delight.

Of the small portions of happiness—as we should regard them—dealt out to her, how much Charlotte Brontë made! And how thankfully she received them! Those who have an abundance can hardly conceive of the joy with which these crumbs were gathered up. How many times she speaks of her scant possessions of human love! "Let me be content with a temperate draught from the living spring," she says. But, once she murmured. It was at the last, when Death was about to put forth a pitiless hand to take her from the good man and true lover who had waited so long for the wife he was to lose so soon. "Oh, I am not going to die, am I?" was Charlotte Brontë's pathetic whisper. "He will not separate us, we have been so happy!"