FRANCIS WILLIAMS.

"Such shrines as these are pilgrim shrines--
Shrines to no code or creed confined;
The Delphian vales, the Palestines,
The Meccas of the mind."

HALLECK.

The date is September 5, 1857. I am at Haworth, whither I had walked from
the Bradford Station, some ten or twelve miles distant. This Haworth--a
place but a few years since quite unknown to any but the few residing in
its immediate vicinity--is built upon the side of a hill, and, with its
long line of grey houses creeping up the slope, seems like a huge saurian
monster, sprawling along the hill-side, his head near the top and his tail
reaching nearly to the vale below. At the summit, in the very head of our
saurian, stands Haworth Parsonage, and the church near by, with the square
old tower rising above the houses that cluster about it. I well remember
my first view of this place. It was an autumn afternoon, and near sunset.
The sky had been cloudy, but as I stopped to take my first long look at
the little village, so hallowed by the memory of the Bronte sisters, the
declining sun sent through a breach in the clouds a few spears of dazzling
light, that played about the old church and parsonage with an ineffable
glory. It lasted but a few moments, the sun went down, and darkness and
night gradually settled over the scene. The little incident seemed almost
like a type of the life of the gifted woman chiefly to whom Haworth owes
its fame; for her life, like this very day, had been dark and wearisome,
overshadowed by clouds of cares, tears falling like rain-drops upon
new-made graves, until near its close, when there came a sweet season of
bright domestic happiness, that lasted too shortly, and then gave place to
the darkness and night of death.

Strolling through the village, after my quiet meal at the Black Bull Inn,
which poor Branwell Bronte had so often frequented, I stopped to make some
trifling purchases at a stationery store, and casually asked the
proprietor--a small, delicate-looking man, with a bright eye and a highly
intellectual countenance--if he remembered the Bronte sisters. It was a
fortunate question, for he knew them well, and was a personal friend of
the authoress of Jane Eyre, to whose handsomely-framed portrait he
proudly pointed. He had provided her, as he said, with joyful delight,
with the paper on which she wrote the manuscripts of most of her novels;
he is referred to in one of Miss Bronte's letters