tery of De
Quincey. There are phrases that Thackeray would not have used, such as
jar on the ear and betray an immature taste. "Necropolis" is a strange
affectation when "City of the Dead" was at hand; and "pointing to the
pale piles" is a hideous alliteration. But in spite of such
immaturities (and the writer never saw the text in type) the passage
shows wonderful power of language and sense of music in prose. How
fine is the sentence, "taking me to her death-cold bosom, and holding
me with arms of bone," and that of the tombstones, "in a glimmer more
hoary than moonlight" Coleridge might have used such a phrase in the
_Ancient Mariner_ or in _Christabel_. Yet these were the thoughts and
the words of a lonely girl of thirty as she watched the dreary
churchyard at Haworth from the windows of its unlovely parsonage.

This vivid power of painting in words is specially called forth by the
look of nature and the scenes she describes. Charlotte Bronte had, in
the highest degree, that which Ruskin has called the "pathetic
fallacy," the eye which beholds nature coloured by the light of the
inner soul. In this quality she really reaches the level of fine
poetry. Her intense sympathy with her native moors and glens is akin
to that of Wordsworth. She almost never attempts to describe any
scenery with which she is not deeply familiar. But how wonderfully she
catches the tone of her own moorland, skies, storm-winds, secluded hall
or cottage!

The charm of the hour lay in its approaching dimness, in the
low-gliding and pale-beaming sun. I was a mile from Thornfield, in a
lane noted for wild roses in summer, for nuts and blackberries in
autumn, and even now possessing a few coral treasures in hips and haws,
but whose best winter delight lay in its utter solitude and leafless
repose. If a breath of air stirred, it made no sound here; for there
was not a holly, not an evergreen to rustle, and the stripped hawthorn
and hazel bushes were as still as the white worn stones which
causewayed the middle of the path. Far and wide, on each side, there
were only fields, where no cattle now browsed; and the little brown
birds, which stirred occasionally in the hedge, looked like single
russet leaves that had forgotten to drop. . . . From my seat I could
look down on Thornfield: the gray and battlemented hall was the
principal object in the vale below me; its woods and dark rookery rose
against the west. I lingered till the sun