this is only to be paralleled by another
of their assertions, namely, that by their magic might they can reduce
the world to a desert, the purest waters to streams of livid poison, and
the clearest lakes to stagnant water, the pestilential vapours of which
shall slay all living creatures, except the bloodthirsty beast of the
forest, and the ravenous bird of the rock. But that in the midst of this
desolation the palace of the chief Genii shall rise sparkling in the
wilderness, and the horrible howl of their war-cry shall spread over the
land at morning, at noontide, and at night; but that they shall have
their annual feast over the bones of the dead, and shall yearly rejoice
with the joy of victors. I think, sir, that the horrible wickedness of
this needs no remark, and therefore I hasten to subscribe myself, etc."

Puerile, if you like, and puerile all the stuff that Charlotte Bronte
wrote before eighteen-forty-six; but her style at thirteen, in its very
rhythms and cadences, is the unmistakable embryo of her style at thirty;
and M. Heger no more cured her of its faults that he could teach her its
splendours. Something that was not Brussels made Miss Bronte a
prodigious author at thirteen. The mere mass of her _Juvenilia_
testifies to a most ungovernable bent. Read the list of works, appalling
in their length, which this child produced in a period of fifteen
months; consider that she produced nothing but melancholy letters during
her "sojourn in Brussels"; and compare M. Heger's academic precepts with
her practice, with the wild sweep and exuberance of her style when she
has shaken him off, and her genius gets possession of her.

I know there is a gulf fixed between Currer Bell and Charles Townsend,
who succeeded Lord Charles Albert Florian Wellesley and the Marquis of
Douro, about eighteen-thirty-eight; but it is bridged by the later
_Poems_ which show Charlotte's genius struggling through a wrong medium
to the right goal. She does not know--after the sojourn in Brussels she
does not yet know--that her right medium is prose. She knew no more than
she knew in November, eighteen-forty-one, when, on the eve of her flight
from Haworth, she writes: "The plain fact is, I was not, I am not now,
certain of my destiny." It was not until two years after she had
returned to Haworth that she received her certainty. For posterity,
overpowered by the labour of the Bronte specialists, it may seem as if
Charlotte Bronte's genius owed