O strife, O curse, that o'er it fall! His dews drop mutely on the hill, Though on its slope men sow and reap: He giveth His beloved, sleep. Yea, men may wonder while they scan For me, my heart that erst did go Most like a tired child at a show, That sees through tears the jugglers leap, Would now its wearied vision close, Would childlike on His love repose, Who giveth His beloved, sleep. CHAPTER IX. EMILY BRONTË GEORGE ELIOT -MENELLA BUTE THE SMEDLEY. HE bleakly-situated parsonage of Haworth, among the Yorkshire Moors, will long be associated with some of the most heroic literary work ever accomplished; heroic, not by reason of the matter turned out, but heroic because of the stress of suffering and repression under which it was accomplished. There, in the early part of the century, lived the Rev. Patrick Brontë, a morose Irishman of violent will and few sympathies. His consumptive wife bore him a numerous family, and wasted away of a cancer, partly, and partly of heart-break. When Mr. Brontë's sister-inlaw came to manage his home for him, she found that his whole household consisted of five daughters and one son, all delicate, and all peculiar. Two of these girls died soon thereafter, at a miserable school whither Emily and her sisters had been sent to gain a scanty education. This was an establishment for clergymen's daughters at Cowan's Bridge its horrors have been described in "Jane Eyre." The remaining three sisters differed in their talents and in their dispositions. Anne was the gentlest, the most sentimental, and the least able to withstand the hardships of life. Her chief contribution to literature is the novel called "Agnes Grey." Charlotte, compact in mind and body, was the most business-like, the most versatile, the most reasonable. In any situation she could find certain amenities. Emily, who made the nearest approach to beauty, had the dauntless will of her father. With narrower capacities than her sister Charlotte had-but these intensified to an extraordinary degree-she passed through a world of awful trial with but one purpose in her heart-never to flinch from pain. If ever a literary woman had heroic stuff in her, that woman was Emily Brontë. "She should have been a man!" said a little Belgian professor who taught her French at Brussels," She should have been a man, a navigator!" Emily Brontë was born at Hartshead-cum-Clifton, near Leeds, in 1818, a year before the Brontë family established itself at Haworth. After her return from Cowan's Bridge she was again sent to school under happier circumstances, but the strange girl, who hardly made a friend in her life, yearned so for communion with nature on the lonely moorlands where she had been bred, that her sister Charlotte sent her home again lest she should die. Once more she essayed to make a struggle in the outer world, and took the post of a teacher at Halifax; but there her health really gave way, and she was compelled to resign herself to home duties, while her sisters earned their living, and a little money over and above, as school-mistresses. The secret hopes of all three girls centred in their brother Branwell, a youth of an emotional nature which was taken to be of great artistic promise. His character was devoid of all firmness, and at the period of Emily's final return to home, he had already compromised himself unmistakably by vicious tendencies. However, his sisters, and even his stern father, gave him licence to develop himself as he pleased; and the three devoted girls held before themselves as their supreme attainment, the establishment of a ladies' school at Haworth, the profits of which might send their young genius to make his name in London. The prospect which chance held out to them of obtaining a school elsewhere, induced Charlotte and Emily, to borrow a little money with which to pursue a short course of study at Brussels. The principal result of Charlotte's experience there was "Villette." At the Brussels school Emily was peevish and home-sick. There remains, however, a fine poem written by the girl at this time. It expresses her dreary longings for familiar things, and contains the following tender lines upon the home scenery :— A little and a lone green lane A heaven so dear, an earth so calm, So sweet, so soft, so hushed an air; On her return to home Emily had to devote herself to household duty more than ever, as her aunt was now dead. Branwell was a drunkard, and her father was partially blind and held himself much aloof even from his own children. She worked like a servant in the house, and one or two village girls who occasionally came to help her noticed that whilst she was baking, or performing any other drudgery of the kind, she would now and then pull a pencil from her pocket and hastily make a jotting or two upon paper. By and by Charlotte discovered a whole manuscript volume filled with poems, each in Emily's cramped but clear handwriting. When she had overcome the strong resentment which Emily displayed at having her secret solace found out, she urged her to agree that these poems should be launched upon the world of publishers. Seeing that Charlotte thought so much of Emily's poems, Anne timidly produced similar specimens from her own store. The re sult was that the three collected their choicest efforts into a manuscript volume, which they entitled "Poems by Currer Ellis and Acton Bell," and sent from publisher to publisher. These nowhere found any encouragement, until at last Messrs. Aylott and Jones, of Paternoster Row, wrote that they would produce the volume upon payment of thirty guineas. The thirty guineas were scraped together; the volume was published and fell utterly dead, except for a slight acknowledgment from the Athenæum. And yet, while Charlotte's verses contained much skilful description, and Anne's were at least no feebler than many metrical contributions to magazines of the day, some of Emily's poems in this book are full of such original and intensethough hardly attractive-writing as gives her quite a unique and lofty position among our poets. The note of these poems comes very near despair, but such is the strength of Emily's character that it is rather a desperate courage. Selfdependent in every act and thought of her life, she will recognise nothing in the universe but the beauty of the external world and the strength of her own intellectual being. She expresses no hope in the future or in a God other than a vague pantheistic hope; she throws abroad small sympathy for her fellow-beings. The history of the world does not entice her to be its prophetess; she breathes into her poetry only her individual self, but expresses that self so nobly that we find in some of her verses the elements of such a character as in different circumstances might have turned her into a Maid of Orleans, or a Madam Roland. The soul of Emily Brontë was ever "Struggling fierce toward Heaven's free wilderness" with strong wings, and with the loneliness of wings. The history of all the shame which Branwell Brontë brought upon his family before he ended his miserable existence does not concern us here, further than this fact, that Emily was the only sister who never gave over loving |