1850:--

'A few days since, a little incident happened which curiously touched
me. Papa put into my hands a little packet of letters and papers,
telling me that they were mamma's, and that I might read them. I did
read them, in a frame of mind I cannot describe. The papers were
yellow with time, all having been written before I was born. It was
strange now to peruse, for the first time, the records of a mind
whence my own sprang; and most strange, and at once sad and sweet, to
find that mind of a truly fine, pure, and elevated order. They were
written to papa before they were married. There is a rectitude, a
refinement, a constancy, a modesty, a sense, a gentleness about them
indescribable. I wish she had lived, and that I had known her.'

Yet another forty years or so and the little packet is in my possession.
Handling, with a full sense of their sacredness, these letters, written
more than eighty years ago by a good woman to her lover, one is tempted
to hope that there is no breach of the privacy which should, even in our
day, guide certain sides of life, in publishing the correspondence in its
completeness. With the letters I find a little MS., which is also of
pathetic interest. It is entitled 'The Advantages of Poverty in
Religious Concerns,' and it is endorsed in the handwriting of Mr. Bronte,
written, doubtless, many years afterwards:--

'_The above was written by my dear wife_, _and is for insertion in
one of the periodical publications_. _Keep it as a memorial of
her_.'

There is no reason to suppose that the MS. was ever published; there is
no reason why any editor should have wished to publish it. It abounds in
the obvious. At the same time, one notes that from both father and
mother alike Charlotte Bronte and her sisters inherited some measure of
the literary faculty. It is nothing to say that not one line of the
father's or mother's would have been preserved had it not been for their
gifted children. It is sufficient that the zest for writing was there,
and that the intense passion for handling a pen, which seems to have been
singularly strong in Charlotte Bronte, must have come to a great extent
from a similar passion alike in father and mother. Mr. Bronte, indeed,
may be counted a prolific author. He published, in all, four books,
three pamphlets, and two sermons. Of his books, two were in verse and
two in prose. _Cottage Poems_