own
with a tired little wife, and with inferior people, is a despot. He busies
himself with trifles, looks after foolish details, and the neighbors let
him have his own way and his wife has to, and the result is that he
becomes convinced in his own mind that he is the people and that wisdom
will die with him.

And yet Bronte wrote some pretty good poetry, and had faculties that
rightly developed might have made him an excellent man. He should have
gone down to London (or up, because it is south) and there come into
competition with men as strong as himself. Fate should have seized him by
the hair and bumped his head against stone walls and cuffed him
thoroughly, and kicked him into line, teaching him humility, then out of
the scrimmage we might have gotten a really superior product.

Mrs. Bronte became a confirmed invalid. A man can not always badger a
woman; God is good--she dies. Little Maria Branwell had been married eight
years; when she passed out she left six children, "all of a size," a
neighbor woman has written. Over her grave is a tablet erected by her
husband informing the wayfarer that "she has gone to meet her Savior." At
the bottom is this warning to all women: "Be ye also ready; for in such an
hour as ye think not the Son of Man cometh."

Five of these motherless children were girls and one a boy.

As you stand there in that stone church at Haworth reading the inscription
above Maria Branwell's grave, you can also read the death record of the
babes she left. The mother died on September Fifteenth, Eighteen Hundred
Twenty-one; her oldest daughter, Maria, on May Sixth, Eighteen Hundred
Twenty-five; Elizabeth, June Fifteenth, Eighteen Hundred Twenty-five;
Patrick Branwell, on September Twenty-fourth, Eighteen Hundred
Forty-eight; Emily, December Nineteenth, Eighteen Hundred Forty-eight;
Anne, May Twenty-eighth, Eighteen Hundred Forty-nine; and Charlotte, on
March Thirty-first, Eighteen Hundred Fifty-five. Those whom the gods love
die young: the Reverend Patrick Bronte lived to be eighty-five years old.

* * * * *

I got out of the train at Keighley, which you must pronounce "Keethley,"
and leaving my valise with the station-master started on foot for Haworth,
four miles away.

Keighley is a manufacturing town where various old mansions have been
turned into factories, and new factories have sprung up, square,
spick-span, trimmed-stone buildings, with fire-escapes and red