s that of that family
of poets in their solitude yonder on the gloomy northern moors! At nine
o'clock at night, Mrs. Gaskell tells, after evening prayers, when their
guardian and relative had gone to bed, the three poetesses--the three
maidens, Charlotte, and Emily, and Anne--Charlotte being the "motherly
friend and guardian to the other two"--"began, like restless wild
animals, to pace up and down their parlor, 'making out' their wonderful
stories, talking over plans and projects, and thoughts of what was to be
their future life."

One evening, at the close of 1854, as Charlotte Nicholls sat with her
husband by the fire, listening to the howling of the wind about the
house, she suddenly said to her husband, "If you had not been with me,
I must have been writing now." She then ran up stairs, and brought down,
and read aloud, the beginning of a new tale. When she had finished,
her husband remarked, "The critics will accuse you of repetition." She
replied, "Oh! I shall alter that. I always begin two or three times
before I can please myself." But it was not to be. The trembling
little hand was to write no more. The heart newly awakened to love and
happiness, and throbbing with maternal hope, was soon to cease to beat;
that intrepid outspeaker and champion of truth, that eager, impetuous
redresser of wrong, was to be called out of the world's fight and
struggle, to lay down the shining arms, and to be removed to a sphere
where even a noble indignation cor ulterius nequit lacerare, and where
truth complete, and right triumphant, no longer need to wage war.

I can only say of this lady, vidi tantum. I saw her first just as I rose
out of an illness from which I had never thought to recover. I remember
the trembling little frame, the little hand, the great honest eyes.
An impetuous honesty seemed to me to characterize the woman. Twice
I recollect she took me to task for what she held to be errors in
doctrine. Once about Fielding we had a disputation. She spoke her mind
out. She jumped too rapidly to conclusions. (I have smiled at one or
two passages in the "Biography," in which my own disposition or behavior
forms the subject of talk.) She formed conclusions that might be wrong,
and built up whole theories of character upon them. New to the London
world, she entered it with an independent, indomitable spirit of her
own; and judged of contemporaries, and especially spied out arrogance or
affectation, with extraordinary keennes