Some day our spirits may be permitted to walk in galleries of fancies more wondrous and beautiful than any achieved works which at present we see, and our minds to behold and delight in masterpieces which poets’ and artists’ minds have fathered and conceived only.

With a feeling much akin to that with which I looked upon the friend’s—­the admirable artist’s—­unfinished work, I can fancy many readers turning to the last pages which were traced by Charlotte Bronte’s hand.  Of the multitude that have read her books, who has not known and deplored the tragedy of her family, her own most sad and untimely fate?  Which of her readers has not become her friend?  Who that has known her books has not admired the artist’s noble English, the burning love of truth, the bravery, the simplicity, the indignation at wrong, the eager sympathy, the pious love and reverence, the passionate honor, so to speak, of the woman?  What a story is 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