s
and disappointment into riches and content. For a time at least, and
before a hard and degrading experience had broken the spring of her
youth, and replaced the disinterested and spontaneous pleasure that is to
be got from the life and play of imagination, by a sad sense of duty, and
an inexorable consciousness of moral and religious mission, Anne Bronte
wrote stories for her own amusement, and loved the 'rascals' she created.

But already in 1841, when we first hear of the Gondals and Solala Vernon,
the material for quite other books was in poor Anne's mind. She was then
teaching in the family at Thorpe Green, where Branwell joined her as
tutor in 1843, and where, owing to events that are still a mystery, she
seems to have passed through an ordeal that left her shattered in health
and nerve, with nothing gained but those melancholy and repulsive
memories that she was afterwards to embody in 'Wildfell Hall.' She
seems, indeed, to have been partly the victim of Branwell's morbid
imagination, the imagination of an opium-eater and a drunkard. That he
was neither the conqueror nor the villain that he made his sisters
believe, all the evidence that has been gathered since Mrs. Gaskell wrote
goes to show. But poor Anne believed his account of himself, and no
doubt saw enough evidence of vicious character in Branwell's daily life
to make the worst enormities credible. She seems to have passed the last
months of her stay at Thorpe Green under a cloud of dread and miserable
suspicion, and was thankful to escape from her situation in the summer of
1845. At the same moment Branwell was summarily dismissed from his
tutorship, his employer, Mr. Robinson, writing a stern letter of
complaint to Bramwell's father, concerned no doubt with the young man's
disorderly and intemperate habits. Mrs. Gaskell says: 'The premature
deaths of two at least of the sisters--all the great possibilities of
their earthly lives snapped short--may be dated from Midsummer 1845.'
The facts as we now know them hardly bear out so strong a judgment.
There is nothing to show that Branwell's conduct was responsible in any
way for Emily's illness and death, and Anne, in the contemporary fragment
recovered by Mr. Shorter, gives a less tragic account of the matter.
'During my stay (at Thorpe Green),' she writes on July 31, 1845, 'I have
had some very unpleasant and undreamt-of experience of human nature. . . .
Branwell has . . . been a tutor at Thorpe Gree