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Eminent Women Series
Edited by John H. Ingram
EMILY BRONTE
All Rights Reserved.
EMILY BRONTE
by
A. MARY F. ROBINSON
Second Edition.
London:
W. H. Allen and Co.
13, Waterloo Place
1883.
[All Rights Reserved]
London:
Printed by W. H. Allen and Co., 13 Waterloo Place. S.W.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
Introduction 1
CHAPTER I.
Parentage 8
CHAPTER II.
Babyhood 18
CHAPTER III.
Cowan's Bridge 28
CHAPTER IV.
Childhood 40
CHAPTER V.
Going to School 53
CHAPTER VI.
Girlhood at Haworth 61
CHAPTER VII.
In the Rue d'Isabelle 77
CHAPTER VIII.
A Retrospect 92
CHAPTER IX.
The Recall 103
CHAPTER X.
The Prospectuses 111
CHAPTER XI.
Branwell's Fall 116
CHAPTER XII.
Writing Poetry 128
CHAPTER XIII.
Troubles 144
CHAPTER XIV.
Wuthering Heights: its Origin 154
CHAPTER XV.
Wuthering Heights: the Story 168
CHAPTER XVI.
'Shirley' 209
CHAPTER XVII.
Branwell's End 217
CHAPTER XVIII.
Emily's Death 223
FINIS! 233
* * * * *
LIST OF AUTHORITIES.
1846-56. The Works of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.
1857. Life of Charlotte Bronte. _Mrs. Gaskell. 1st and 2nd Editions._
1877. Charlotte Bronte. _T. Wemyss Reid._
1877. Note on Charlotte Bronte. _A. C. Swinburne._
1881. Three Great Englishwomen. _P. Bayne._
MS. Lecture on Emily Bronte. _T. Wemyss Reid._
MS. Notes on Emily and Charlotte Bronte. _Miss Ellen Nussey._
MS. Letters of Charlotte and Branwell Bronte.
1879. Reminiscences of the Brontes. _Miss E. Nussey._
1870. Unpublished Letters of Charlotte, Emily,
and Anne Bronte. _Hours at Home._
1846. Emily Bronte's Annotated Copy of her Poems.
1872. Branwell Bronte: in the "Mirror." _G. S. Phillips._
1879. Pictures of the Past. _F. H. Grundy._
1830. Prospectus of the Clergymen's Daughters' School
at Cowan's Bridge.
1850. Preface to Wuthering Heights. _Charlotte Bronte._
1850. Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell. _Charlotte Bronte._
1850. Wuthering Heights: in the "Palladium." _Sydney Dobell._
Personal Reminiscences of Mrs. Wood, Mrs. Ratcliffe, Mrs. Brown,
and Mr. William Wood, of Haworth.
1811-18. Poems of Patrick Bronte, B.A., Incumbent of Haworth.
1879. Haworth: Past and Present. _J. Horsfall Turner._
* * * * *
EMILY BRONTE.
INTRODUCTION.
There are, perhaps, few tests of excellence so sure as the popular
verdict on a work of art a hundred years after its accomplishment. So
much time must be allowed for the swing and rebound of taste, for the
despoiling of tawdry splendours and to permit the work of art itself to
form a public capable of appreciating it. Such marvellous fragments
reach us of Elizabethan praises; and we cannot help recalling the number
of copies of 'Prometheus Unbound' sold in the lifetime of the poet. We
know too well "what porridge had John Keats," and remember with
misgiving the turtle to which we treated Hobbs and Nobbs at dinner, and
how complacently we watched them put on their laurels afterwards.
Let us, then, by all means distrust our own and the public estimation of
all heroes dead within a hundred years. Let us, in laying claim to an
infallible verdict, remember how oddly our decisions sound at the other
side of Time's whispering gallery. Shall we therefore pronounce only on
Chaucer and Shakespeare, on Gower and our learned Ben? Alas! we are too
sure of their relative merits; we stake our reputations with no qualms,
no battle-ardours. These we reserve to them for whom the future is not
yet secure, for whom a timely word may still be spoken, for whom we yet
may feel that lancing out of enthusiasm only possible when the cast of
fate is still unknown, and, as we fight, we fancy that the glory of our
hero is in our hands.
But very gradually the victory is gained. A taste is unconsciously
formed for the qualities necessary to the next development of
art--qualities which Blake in his garret, Millet without the sou, set
down in immortal work. At last, when the time is ripe, some connoisseur
sees the picture, blows the dust from the book, and straightway blazons
his discovery. Mr. Swinburne, so to speak, blew the dust from 'Wuthering
Heights'; and now it keeps its proper rank in the shelf where Coleridge
and Webster, Hofmann and Leopardi have their place. Until then, a few
brave lines of welcome from Sydney Dobell, one fine verse of Mr.
Arnold's, one notice from Mr. Reid, was all the praise that had been
given to the book by those in authority. Here and there a mill-girl in
the West Riding factories read and re-read the tattered copy from the
lending library; here and there some eager, unsatisfied, passionate
child came upon the book and loved it, in spite of chiding, finding in
it an imagination that satisfied, and a storm that cleared the air; or
some strong-fibred heart felt without a shudder the justice of that
stern vision of inevitable, inherited ruin following the chance-found
child of foreign sailor and seaport mother. But these readers were not
many; even yet the book is not popular.
For, in truth, the qualities that distinguish Emily Bronte are not those
which are of the first necessity to a novelist. She is without
experience; her range of character is narrow and local; she has no
atmosphere of broad humanity like George Eliot; she has not Jane
Austen's happy gift of making us love in a book what we have overlooked
in life; we do not recognise in her the human truth and passion, the
never-failing serene bitterness of humour, that have made for Charlotte
Bronte a place between Cervantes and Victor Hugo.
Emily Bronte is of a different class. Her imagination is narrower, but
more intense; she sees less, but what she sees is absolutely present: no
writer has described the moors, the wind, the skies, with her passionate
fidelity, but this is all of Nature that she describes. Her narrow
fervid nature accounted as simple annoyance the trivial scenes and
personages touched with immortal sympathy and humour in 'Villette' and
'Shirley'; Paul Emanuel himself appeared to her only as a pedantic and
exacting taskmaster; but, on the other hand, to a certain class of mind,
there is nothing in fiction so moving as the spectacle of Heathcliff
dying of joy--an unnatural, unreal joy--his panther nature paralysed,
_aneanti_, in a delirium of visionary bliss.
Only an imagination of the rarest power could conceive such a
denouement, requiting a life of black ingratitude by no mere common
horrors, no vulgar Bedlam frenzy; but by the torturing apprehension of a
happiness never quite grasped, always just beyond the verge of
realisation. Only an imagination of the finest and rarest touch,
absolutely certain of tread on that path of a single hair which alone
connects this world with the land of dreams. Few have trod that perilous
bridge with the fearlessness of Emily Bronte: that is her own ground and
there she wins our highest praise; but place her on the earth, ask her
to interpret for us the common lives of the surrounding people, she can
give no answer. The swift and certain spirit moves with the clumsy
hesitating gait of a bird accustomed to soar.
She tells us what she saw; and what she saw and what she was incapable
of seeing are equally characteristic. All the wildness of that moorland,
all the secrets of those lonely farms, all the capabilities of the one
tragedy of passion and weakness that touched her solitary life, she
divined and appropriated; but not the life of the village at her feet,
not the bustle of the mills, the riots, the sudden alternations of
wealth and poverty; not the incessant rivalry of church and chapel; and
while the West Riding has known the prototype of nearly every person and
nearly every place in 'Jane Eyre' and 'Shirley,' not a single character
in 'Wuthering Heights' ever climbed the hills round Haworth.
Say that two foreigners have passed through Staffordshire, leaving us
their reports of what they have seen. The first, going by day, will tell
us of the hideous blackness of the country; but yet more, no doubt, of
that awful, patient struggle of man with fire and darkness, of the grim
courage of those unknown lives; and he would see what they toil for,
women with little children in their arms; and he would notice the blue
sky beyond the smoke, doubly precious for such horrible environment. But
the second traveller has journeyed through the night; neither squalor
nor ugliness, neither sky nor children, has he seen, only a vast stretch
of blackness shot through with flaming fires, or here and there burned
to a dull red by heated furnaces; and before these, strange toilers,
half naked, scarcely human, and red in the leaping flicker and gleam of
the fire. The meaning of their work he could not see, but a fearful and
impressive phantasmagoria of flame and blackness and fiery energies at
work in the encompassing night.
So differently did the black country of this world appear to Charlotte,
clear-seeing and compassionate, and to Emily Bronte, a traveller through
the shadows. Each faithfully recorded what she saw, and the place was
the same, but how unlike the vision! The spectacles of temperament
colour the world very differently for each beholder; and, to understand
the vision, we too should for a moment look through the seer's glass. To
gain some such transient glance, to gain and give some such momentary
insight into the character of Emily Bronte, has been the aim I have
tried to make in this book. That I have not fulfilled my desire is
perhaps inevitable--the task has been left too long. If I have done
anything at all I feel that much of the reward is due to my many and
generous helpers. Foremost among them I must thank Dr. Ingham, my kind
host at Haworth, Mrs. Wood, Mr. William Wood, Mrs. Brown, and Mrs.
Ratcliffe of that parish--all of whom had known the now perished family
of Bronte; and my thanks are due no less to Mr. T. Wemyss Reid, as will
be seen further on, to Mr. J. H. Ingram, and to Mr. Biddell, who have
collected much valuable information for my benefit; and most of all do I
owe gratitude and thankfulness to Miss Ellen Nussey, without whose
generous help my work must have remained most ignorant and astray. To
her, had it been worthier, had it been all the subject merits, and yet
without those shadows of gloom and trouble enjoined by the nature of the
story; to her, could I only have spoken of the high noble character of
Emily Bronte and not of the great trials of her life, I should have
ventured to dedicate this study. But to Emily's friend I only offer
what, through her, I have learned of Emily; she, who knew so little of
Branwell's shames and sorrow is unconcerned with this, their sad and
necessary record. Only the lights and sunshine of my work I dedicate to
her. It may be that I have given too great a share to the shadows, to
the manifold follies and failures of Branwell Bronte. Yet in Emily
Bronte's life the shaping influences were so few, and the sins of this
beloved and erring brother had so large a share in determining the bent
of her genius, that to have passed them by would have been to ignore the
shock which turned the fantasy of the 'Poems' into the tragedy of
'Wuthering Heights.' It would have been to leave untold the patience,
the courage, the unselfishness which perfected Emily Bronte's heroic
character; and to have left her burdened with the calumny of having
chosen to invent the crimes and violence of her _dramatis personae_. Not
so, alas! They were but reflected from the passion and sorrow that
darkened her home; it was no perverse fancy which drove that pure and
innocent girl into ceaseless brooding on the conquering force of sin and
the supremacy of injustice.
She brooded over the problem night and day; she took its difficulties
passionately to heart; in the midst of her troubled thoughts she wrote
'Wuthering Heights.' From the clear spirit which inspires the end of her
work, we know that the storm is over; we know that her next tragedy
would be less violent. But we shall never see it; for--and it is by this
that most of us remember her--suddenly and silently she died.
She died, before a single word of worthy praise had reached her. She
died with her work misunderstood and neglected. And yet not unhappy. For
her home on the moors was very dear to her, the least and homeliest
duties pleasant; she loved her sisters with devoted friendship, and she
had many little happinesses in her patient, cheerful, unselfish life.
Would that I could show her as she was!--not the austere and violent
poetess who, cuckoo-fashion, has usurped her place; but brave to fate
and timid of man; stern to herself, forbearing to all weak and erring
things; silent, yet sometimes sparkling with happy sallies. For to
represent her as she was would be her noblest and most fitting
monument.
CHAPTER I.
PARENTAGE.
Emily Bronte was born of parents without any peculiar talent for
literature. It is true that her mother's letters are precisely and
prettily written. It is true that her father published a few tracts and
religious poems. But in neither case is there any vestige of literary or
poetical endowment. Few, indeed, are the Parish Magazines which could
not show among their contents poems and articles greatly superior to the
weak and characterless effusions of the father of the Brontes. The fact
seems important; because in this case not one member of a family, but a
whole family, is endowed in more or less degree with faculties not
derived from either parent.
For children may inherit genius from parents who are themselves not
gifted, as two streaming currents of air unite to form a liquid with
properties different from either; and never is biography more valuable
than when it allows us to perceive by what combination of allied
qualities, friction of opposing temperaments, recurrence of ancestral
traits, the subtle thing we call character is determined. In this case,
since, as I have said, the whole family manifested a brilliance not to
be found in either parent, such a study would be peculiarly interesting.
But, unfortunately, the history of the children's father and the
constitution of the children's mother is all that is clear to our
investigation.
Yet even out of this very short pedigree two important factors of genius
declare themselves--two potent and shaping inheritances. From their
father, Currer, Ellis, and Acton derived a strong will. From their
mother, the disease that slew Emily and Anne in the prime of their youth
and made Charlotte always delicate and ailing. In both cases the boy,
Patrick Branwell, was very slightly affected; but he too died young,
from excesses that suggest a taint of insanity in his constitution.
Insanity and genius stand on either side consumption, its worse and
better angels. Let none call it impious or absurd to rank the greatest
gift to mankind as the occasional result of an inherited tendency to
tubercular disease. There are of course very many other determining
causes; yet is it certain that inherited scrofula or phthisis may come
out, not in these diseases, or not only in these diseases, but in an
alteration, for better or for worse, of the condition of the mind. Out
of evil good may come, or a worse evil.
The children's father was a nervous, irritable and violent man, who
endowed them with a nervous organisation easily disturbed and an
indomitable force of volition. The girls, at least, showed both these
characteristics. Patrick Branwell must have been a weaker, more
brilliant, more violent, less tenacious, less upright copy of his
father; and seems to have suffered no modification from the patient and
steadfast moral nature of his mother. She was the model that her
daughters copied, in different degrees, both in character and health.
Passion and will their father gave them. Their genius came directly from
neither parent; but from the constitution of their natures.
In addition, on both sides, the children got a Celtic strain; and this
is a matter of significance, meaning a predisposition to the
superstition, imagination and horror that is a strand in all their work.
Their mother, Maria Branwell, was of a good middle-class Cornish family,
long established as merchants in Penzance. Their father was the son of
an Irish peasant, Hugh Prunty, settled in the north of Ireland, but
native to the south.
The history of the Rev. Patrick Bronte, B.A. (whose fine Greek name,
shortened from the ancient Irish appellation of Bronterre, was so
naively admired by his children), is itself a remarkable and interesting
story.
The Reverend Patrick Bronte was one of the ten children of a peasant
proprietor at Ahaderg in county Down. The family to which he belonged
inherited strength, good looks, and a few scant acres of potato-growing
soil. They must have been very poor, those ten children, often hungry,
cold and wet; but these adverse influences only seemed to brace the
sinews of Patrick Prunty and to nerve his determination to rise above
his surroundings. He grew up a tall and strong young fellow, unusually
handsome with a well-shaped head, regular profile and fine blue eyes. A
vivacious impressible manner effectually masked a certain selfishness
and rigour of temperament which became plain in after years. He seemed a
generous, quick, impulsive lad. When he was sixteen years of age Patrick
left his father's roof resolved to earn a position for himself. At
Drumgooland, a neighbouring hamlet, he opened what is called in Ireland
a public school; a sort of hedge-school for village children. He stuck
to his trade for five or six years, using his leisure to perfect himself
in general knowledge, mathematics, and a smattering of Greek and Latin.
His efforts deserved to be crowned with success. The Rev. Mr. Tighe,
the clergyman of the parish, was so struck with Patrick Prunty's
determination and ability that he advised him to try for admittance at
one of the English universities; and when the young man was about
five-and-twenty he went, with Mr. Tighe's help, to Cambridge, and
entered at St. John's.
He left Ireland in July, 1802, never to visit it again. He never cared
to look again on the scenes of his early struggle. He never found the
means to revisit mother or home, friends or country. Between Patrick
Bronte, proud of his Greek profile and his Greek name, the handsome
undergraduate at St. John's, and the nine shoeless, hungry young Pruntys
of Ahaderg, there stretched a distance not to be measured by miles.
Under his warm and passionate exterior a fixed resolution to get on in
the world was hidden; but, though cold, the young man was just and
self-denying, and as long as his mother lived she received twenty pounds
a year, spared with difficulty from his narrow income.
Patrick Bronte stayed four years at Cambridge; when he left he had
dropped his Irish accent and taken his B.A. On leaving St. John's he was
ordained to a curacy in Essex.
The young man's energy, of the sort that only toils to reach a given
personal end, had carried him far on the way to success. At twenty
hedge-schoolmaster at Drumgooland, Patrick Bronte was at thirty a
respectable clergyman of the Church of England, with an assured position
and respectable clerical acquaintance. He was getting very near the
goal.
He did not stay long in Essex. A better curacy was offered to him at
Hartshead, a little village between Huddersfield and Halifax in
Yorkshire. While he was at Hartshead the handsome inflammable Irish
curate met Maria Branwell at her uncle's parsonage near Leeds. It was
not the first time that Patrick Bronte had fallen in love; people in the
neighbourhood used to smile at his facility for adoration, and thought
it of a piece with his enthusiastic character. They were quite right; in
his strange nature the violence and the coldness were equally genuine,
both being a means to gratify some personal ambition, desire, or
indolence. It is not an uncommon Irish type; self-important, upright,
honourable, yet with a bent towards subtlety: abstemious in habit, but
with freaks of violent self-indulgence; courteous and impulsive towards
strangers, though cold to members of the household; naturally violent,
and often assuming violence as an instrument of authority; selfish and
dutiful; passionate, and devoid of intense affection.
Miss Branwell was precisely the little person with whom it was natural
that such a man, a self-made man, should fall in love. She was very
small, quiet and gentle, not exactly pretty, but elegant and ladylike.
She was, indeed, a well-educated young lady of good connections; a very
Phoenix she must have seemed in the eyes of a lover conscious of a
background of Pruntyism and potatoes. She was about twenty-one and he
thirty-five when they first met in the early summer of 1812. They were
engaged in August. Miss Branwell's letters reveal a quiet intensity of
devotion, a faculty of judgment, a willingness to forgive passing
slights that must have satisfied the absolute and critical temper of her
lover. Under the devotion and the quietness there is, however, the note
of an independent spirit, and the following extract, with its capability
of self-reliance and desire to rely upon another, reminds one curiously
of passages in her daughter Charlotte's writings:--
"For some years I have been perfectly my own mistress,
subject to no control whatever; so far from it that my
sisters, who are many years older than myself, and even my
dear mother used to consult me on every occasion of
importance, and scarcely ever doubted the propriety of my
words and actions: perhaps you will be ready to accuse me of
vanity in mentioning this, but you must consider that I do
not boast of it. I have many times felt it a disadvantage,
and although, I thank God, it has never led me into error,
yet in circumstances of uncertainty and doubt I have deeply
felt the want of a guide and instructor."
Years afterwards, when Maria Branwell's letters were given into the
hands of her daughter Charlotte and that daughter's most dear and
faithful friend, the two young women felt a keen pang of retrospective
sympathy for the gentle independent little person who, even before her
marriage, had time to perceive that her guide and instructor was not the
infallible Mentor she had thought him at the first. I quote the words of
Charlotte's friend, of more authority and weight on this matter than
those of any other person living, taken from a manuscript which she has
placed at my disposal:--
"Miss Branwell's letters showed that her engagement, though
not a prolonged one, was not as happy as it ought to have
been. There was a pathos of apprehension (though gently
expressed) in part of the correspondence lest Mr. Bronte
should cool in his affection towards her, and the readers
perceived with some indignation that there had been a just
cause for this apprehension. Mr. Bronte, with all his iron
strength and power of will, had his weakness, and one which,
wherever it exists, spoils and debases the character--he had
_personal vanity_. Miss Branwell's finer nature rose above
such weakness; but she suffered all the more from evidences
of it in one to whom she had given her affections and whom
she was longing to look up to in all things."
On the 29th of December, 1812, this disillusioned, loving little lady
was married to Patrick Bronte, from her uncle's parsonage near Leeds.
The young couple took up their abode at Hartshead, Mr. Bronte's curacy.
Three years afterwards they moved, with two little baby girls, Maria and
Elizabeth, to a better living at Thornton. The country round is desolate
and bleak; great winds go sweeping by; young Mrs. Bronte, whose husband
generally sat alone in his study, would have missed her cheerful home in
sunny Penzance (being delicate and prone to superstition), but that she
was a patient and uncomplaining woman, and she had scant time for
thought among her many cares for the thick-coming little lives that
peopled her Yorkshire home. In 1816 Charlotte Bronte was born. In the
next year Patrick Branwell. In 1818 Emily Jane. In 1819 Anne. Then the
health of their delicate and consumptive mother began to break. After
seven years' marriage and with six young children, Mr. and Mrs. Bronte
moved on the 25th of February, 1820, to their new home at Haworth
Vicarage.
The village of Haworth stands, steep and grey, on the topmost side of an
abrupt low hill. Such hills, more steep than high, are congregated
round, circle beyond circle, to the utmost limit of the horizon. Not a
wood, not a river. As far as eye can reach these treeless hills, their
sides cut into fields by grey walls of stone, with here and there a grey
stone village, and here and there a grey stone mill, present no other
colours than the singular north-country brilliance of the green grass,
and the blackish grey of the stone. Now and then a toppling, gurgling
mill-beck gives life to the scene. But the real life, the only beauty of
the country, is set on the top of all the hills, where moor joins moor
from Yorkshire into Lancashire, a coiled chain of wild free places.
White with snow in winter, black at midsummer, it is only when spring
dapples the dark heather-stems with the vivid green of the sprouting
wortleberry bushes, only when in early autumn the moors are one humming
mass of fragrant purple, that any beauty of tint lights up the scene.
But there is always a charm in the moors for hardy and solitary spirits.
Between them and heaven nothing dares to interpose. The shadows of the
coursing clouds alter the aspect of the place a hundred times a day. A
hundred little springs and streams well in its soil, making spots of
livid greenness round their rise. A hundred birds of every kind are
flying and singing there. Larks sing; cuckoos call; all the tribes of
linnets and finches twitter in the bushes; plovers moan; wild ducks fly
past; more melancholy than all, on stormy days, the white sea-mews cry,
blown so far inland by the force of the gales that sweep irresistibly
over the treeless and houseless moors. There in the spring you may take
in your hands the weak, halting fledgelings of the birds; rabbits and
game multiply in the hollows. There in the autumn the crowds of bees,
mad in the heather, send the sound of their humming down the village
street. The winds, the clouds, Nature and life, must be the friends of
those who would love the moors.
But young Mrs. Bronte never could go on the moors. She was frail and
weak, poor woman, when she came to live in the oblong grey stone
parsonage on the windy top of the hill. The village ran sheer down at
her feet; but she could not walk down the steep rough-paven street, nor
on the pathless moors. She was very ill and weak; her husband spent
nearly all his time in the study, writing his poems, his tracts, and his
sermons. She had no companions but the children. And when, in a very few
months, she found that she was sickening of a cancer, she could not bear
to see much of the children that she must leave so soon.
Who dare say if that marriage was happy? Mrs. Gaskell, writing in the
life and for the eyes of Mr. Bronte, speaks of his unwearied care, his
devotion in the night-nursing. But before that fatal illness was
declared, she lets fall many a hint of the young wife's loneliness
during her husband's lengthy, ineffectual studies; of her patient
suffering of his violent temper. She does not say, but we may suppose,
with what inward pleasure Mrs. Bronte witnessed her favourite silk dress
cut into shreds because her husband's pride did not choose that she
should accept a gift; or watched the children's coloured shoes thrown on
the fire, with no money in her purse to get new ones; or listened to her
husband's cavil at the too frequent arrival of his children; or heard
the firing of his pistol-shots at the out-house doors, the necessary
vent of a passion not to be wreaked in words. She was patient, brave,
lonely, and silent. But Mr. Wemyss Reid, who has had unexampled
facilities for studying the Bronte papers, does not scruple to speak of
Mr. Bronte's "persistent coldness and neglect" of his wife, his "stern
and peremptory" dealings with her, of her "habitual dread of her lordly
master"; and the manuscript which I have once already quoted alludes to
the "hard and inflexible will which raised itself sometimes into tyranny
and cruelty." It is within the character of the man that all this should
be true. Safely wed, the woman to whom he had made hot love would
experience no more of his impulsive tenderness. He had provided for her
and done his duty; her duty was to be at hand when he needed her. Yet,
imminent death once declared, all his uprightness, his sense of honour,
would call on him to be careful to the creature he had vowed to love and
cherish, all his selfishness would oblige him to try and preserve the
mother of six little children under seven years of age. "They kept
themselves very close," the village people said; and at least in this
last illness the husband and wife were frequently together. Their love
for each other, new revived and soon to close, seemed to exclude any
thought of the children. We hear expressly that Mr. Bronte, from natural
disinclination, and Mrs. Bronte, from fear of agitation, saw very little
of the small earnest babies who talked politics together in the
"children's study," or toddled hand in hand over the neighbouring moors.
Meanwhile the young mother grew weaker day by day, suffering great pain
and often unable to move. But repining never passed her lips. Perhaps
she did not repine. Perhaps she did not grieve to quit her harassed
life, the children she so seldom saw, her constant pain, the husband
"not dramatic enough in his perceptions to see how miserable others
might be in a life that to him was all-sufficient."[1] For some months
she lay still, asking sometimes to be lifted in bed that she might watch
the nurse cleaning the grate, because she did it as they did in
Cornwall. For some months she suffered more and more. In September,
1821, she died.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: Mrs. Gaskell.]