one of the most passionately affectionate natures both in friendship and home relations—­“my hot tenacious heart,” she once says!  But there was no touch of softness or sentimentality about her; she never feebly condoned weaknesses; her observation of people was minute, her judgment of them severe and even satirical.  Her letters abound in pungent humour and acute perception; and her idea of charity was not that of mild and muddled tolerance.  She had a vein of frank and rather bitter irony when she was indignant, and she could return stroke for stroke.

She knew well that, whatever life was meant to be, it was not intended to be an easy business; but she did not face it stoically or indifferently; she had a fierce desire for knowledge, culture, ideas; she was ambitious; and above everything she desired to be loved; yet she did not think of love in the way in which all English romancers had treated it for over a century, as a condescending hand held out by a superior being, for the glory of which a woman submitted to a more or less contented servitude; but as a glowing equality of passion and worship, in which two hearts clasped each other close, with a sacred concurrence of soul.  And thus it was that she and Robert Browning, above all other writers of the century, put the love of man and woman in the true light, as the supreme worth of life; not as a half-sensuous excitement, with lapses and reactions, but as a great and holy mystery of devotion and service and mutual help.  She too had her little taste of love.  Mr. Nicholls, her father’s curate, a man of deep tenderness behind his quiet homely ways, had proposed to her; she had refused him; but his suffering and bewilderment had touched her deeply, and at last she consented, though she went to her wedding in fear and dread; but she was rewarded, and for a few short months tasted a calm and sweet happiness, the joy of being needed and desired, and at the same time guarded and tended well.  Her pathetic words, when she knew from his lips that she must die, “God will not part us—­we have been so happy,” are full of the deepest tragedy.

I say again that I know of no instance among the most intimate records of the human heart, in which life was faced with such splendid courage as it was by Charlotte Bronte.  It contained so many things which she desired—­art, beauty, thought, peace, deep and tender relations, and the supreme crown of love.  But she never dreamed of trying to escape or shirk her lot.  After her first great success with Jane Eyre, she might have lived life on her own lines; her writing meant wealth to one of her simple tastes; and as her closest friend said, if she had chosen to set up a house of her own, she would have been gratefully thanked for any kindness she might have shown to her household, instead of being, as she was, ruthlessly employed and even tyrannised over.  Consider how a young authoress, with that splendid success to her credit, would nowadays be