of letters was found, wherein it was clearly revealed that she who had always been silent was fully alive to the indifference and fatuous self-love of her vain and indolent husband.  We may, it is true, be conscious of faults in others from which we are ourselves not exempt; although to discover a virtue, perhaps, we must needs have a germ of it in us.  Such were Emily’s parents.  Around her, four sisters and one brother gravely watched the monotonous flight of the hours.  The family dwelling, where Emily’s whole life was spent, was in the heart of the Yorkshire Moors, at a place called Haworth, a gloomy, desolate village; barren, forsaken, and lonely.

There can never have been a childhood and youth so friendless, monotonous, and dreary as that of Emily and her sisters.  There came to them none of those happy little adventures, bright gleams from the unexpected, which we broider and magnify as the years go by, and store at last in our soul as the one inexhaustible treasure acquired by the smiling memory of life.  Each day was the same, from first to last—­lessons, meals, household duties, work beside an old aunt, and long solitary walks that these grave little girls would take hand in hand, speaking but seldom, across the heather now gay with blossom, now white beneath the snow.  At home the father they scarcely saw, who was wholly indifferent, who took his meals in his room, and would come down at night to the rectory parlour and read aloud the appallingly dreary debates of the House of Commons:  without, the silence of the adjoining graveyard, the great treeless desert, and the moors that from autumn to summer were swept by the pitiless wind from the north.

The hazard of life—­for in every life some effort is put forth by fate—­the hazard of life removed Emily three or four times from the desert she had grown to love, and to consider—­as will happen to those who remain too long in one spot—­the only place in the world where the plants, and the earth, and the sky were truly real and delightful.  But after a few weeks’ absence the light would fade from her ardent, beautiful eyes; she pined for home; and one or another of the sisters must hasten to bring her back to the lonely vicarage.

In 1843—­she was then twenty-five—­she returned once again, never more to go forth until summoned by death.  Not an event, or a smile, or a whisper of love in the whole of her life to the day of this final return.  Nor was her memory charged with one of those griefs or deceptions, which enable the weaklings, or those who demand too little of life, to imagine that passive fidelity to something that has of itself collapsed is an act of virtue; that inactivity is justified by the tears wherein it is bathed; and that the duty of life is accomplished when suffering has been made to yield up all its resignation and sorrow.