impressionist, of the Brontes needs is to recover, before all things,
the innocence of the eye. No doubt we all of us had it once, and can
remember more or less what it was like. To those who have lost it I
would say: Go back and read again Mrs. Gaskell's _Life of Charlotte
Bronte_.

Years and years ago, when I was a child, hunting forlornly in my
father's bookshelves, I came upon a small, shabby volume, bound in
yellow linen. The title-page was adorned with one bad wood-cut that
showed a grim, plain house standing obliquely to a churchyard packed
with tombstones--tombstones upright and flat, and slanting at all
angles. In the foreground was a haycock, where the grave grass had been
mown. I do not know how the artist, whose resources were of the
slenderest, contrived to get his overwhelming but fascinating effect of
moorland solitude, of black-grey nakedness and abiding gloom. But he
certainly got it and gave it. There was one other picture, representing
a memorial tablet.

Tombstones always fascinated me in those days, because I was mortally
afraid of them; and I opened that book and read it through.

I could not, in fact, put it down. For the first time I was in the grip
of a reality more poignant than any that I had yet known, of a tragedy
that I could hardly bear. I suppose I have read that book a score of
times since then. There are pages in it that I shrink from approaching
even now, because of the agony of realization they revive. The passing
bell tolled continually in the prelude; it sounded at intervals
throughout; it tolled again at the close. The refrain of "Here lie the
Remains" haunted me like a dolorous song. It seemed to me a decorous and
stately accompaniment to such a tale, and that wood-cut on the
title-page a fitting ornament. I knew every corner of that house. I have
an impression (it is probably a wrong one) of a flagged path going right
down from the Parsonage door through another door and plunging among the
tombs. I saw six little white and wistful faces looking out of an upper
window; I saw six little children going up and up a lane, and I wondered
how the tiny feet of babies ever got so far. I saw six little Bronte
babies lost in the spaces of the illimitable moors. They went over
rough stones and walls and mountain torrents; their absurd petticoats
were blown upwards by the wind, and their feet were tangled in the
heather. They struggled and struggled, and yet were in an ecstasy that I
coul