tage--children like it), good sense, obliging disposition,
cheerful, healthy, possessing a good average capacity, but no
prominent master talent to make her miserable by its cravings for
exercise, by its mutiny under restraint--Louisa thus endowed will
find the post of governess comparatively easy. If she be like her
mother--as you say she is--and if, consequently, she is fond of
children, and possesses tact for managing them, their care is her
natural vocation--she ought to be a governess.

'Your sketch of Braxborne, as it is and as it was, is sadly pleasing.
I remember your first picture of it in a letter written a year
ago--only a year ago. I was in this room--where I now am--when I
received it. I was not alone then. In those days your letters often
served as a text for comment--a theme for talk; now, I read them,
return them to their covers and put them away. Johnson, I think,
makes mournful mention somewhere of the pleasure that accrues when we
are "solitary and cannot impart it." Thoughts, under such
circumstances, cannot grow to words, impulses fail to ripen to
actions.

'Lonely as I am, how should I be if Providence had never given me
courage to adopt a career--perseverance to plead through two long,
weary years with publishers till they admitted me? How should I be
with youth past, sisters lost, a resident in a moorland parish where
there is not a single educated family? In that case I should have no
world at all: the raven, weary of surveying the deluge, and without
an ark to return to, would be my type. As it is, something like a
hope and motive sustains me still. I wish all your daughters--I wish
every woman in England, had also a hope and motive. Alas! there are
many old maids who have neither.--Believe me, yours sincerely,

'C. BRONTE.'

TO W. S. WILLIAMS

'_July_ 26_th_, 1849.

'MY DEAR SIR,--I must rouse myself to write a line to you, lest a
more protracted silence should seem strange.

'Truly glad was I to hear of your daughter's success. I trust its
results may conduce to the permanent advantage both of herself and
her parents.

'Of still more importance than your children's education is your
wife's health,