hat she should have appeared out
of such a parsonage than that she should have arisen out of such a
language.

A re-reading of her works is always a new amazing of her reader who turns
back to review the harvest of her English. It must have been with
rapture that she claimed her own simplicity. And with what a moderation,
how temperately, and how seldom she used her mastery! To the last she
has an occasional attachment to her bonds; for she was not only fire and
air. In one passage of her life she may remind us of the little
colourless and thrifty hen-bird that Lowell watched nest-building with
her mate, and cutting short the flutterings and billings wherewith he
would joyously interrupt the business; Charlotte's nesting bird was a
clergyman. He came, lately affianced, for a week's visit to her
parsonage, and she wrote to her friend before his arrival: "My little
plans have been disarranged by an intimation that Mr.--is coming on
Monday"; and afterwards, in reference to her sewing, "he hindered me for
a full week."

In alternate pages _Villette_ is a book of spirit and fire, and a novel
of illiberal rancour, of ungenerous, uneducated anger, ungentle, ignoble.
In order to forgive its offences, we have to remember in its author's
favour not her pure style set free, not her splendour in literature, but
rather the immeasurable sorrow of her life. To read of that sorrow again
is to open once more a wound which most men perhaps, certainly most
women, received into their hearts in childhood. For the Life of
Charlotte Bronte is one of the first books of biography put into the
hands of a child, to whom _Jane Eyre_ is allowed only in passages. We
are young when we first hear in what narrow beds "the three are laid"--the
two sisters and the brother--and in what a bed of living insufferable
memories the one left lay alone, reviewing the hours of their death--alone
in the sealed house that was only less narrow than their graves. The
rich may set apart and dedicate a room, the poor change their street, but
Charlotte Bronte, in the close captivity of the fortunes of mediocrity,
rested in the chair that had been her dying sister's, and held her
melancholy bridals in the dining room that had been the scene of terrible
and reluctant death.

But closer than the conscious house was the conscious mind. Locked with
intricate wards within the unrelaxing and unlapsing thoughts of this
lonely sister, dwelt a sorrow inconsolable. I