are caricatures or types, according as you like to view them.  To me they are types:  characters finely conceived, and only exaggerated because Charlotte Bronte had never mixed with people of that species in ordinary life.  But I think that one can see into the souls of these people in spite of the exaggerations of speech and gesture and behaviour which disfigure them.  Yet it is not primarily for the character-drawing that I value the book.  What attracts me is the romance, the beauty, the poetry of the whole, and a special union of intellectual force, with passion at white heat, which breathes through them.  The love scenes have the same strange glow that I always feel in Tennyson’s “Come into the garden, Maud,” where the pulse of the lover thrills under one’s hand with the love that beats from the heart of the world.  And then, too, Charlotte Bronte seems to me to have had an incomparable gift of animating a natural scene with vivid human emotions.  The frost-bound day, when the still earth holds its breath, when the springs are congealed, and the causeway is black with slippery ice, in that hour when Jane Eyre first sees Mr. Rochester; and again the scene in the summer garden, just before the thunderstorm, when Mr. Rochester calls her to look at the great hawk-moth drinking from the flower chalice.  Such scenes have a vitality that makes them as real to me as scenes upon which my own eyes have rested.

Again, I know no writer who has caught the poetry of the hearth like Charlotte Bronte.  The evening hours, when the fire leaps in the chimney, and the lamp is lit, and the homeless wind moans outside, and the contented mind possesses its dreams—­I know nothing like that in any book.

Indeed, I do not know any books which give me quite the sense of genius that Charlotte Bronte’s bring me.  I find it difficult to define where the genius lies; but the love which she dares to depict seems to me to have a different quality to any other love; it is the passionate ardour of a pure soul; it embraces body, mind, and heart alike; it is a love that pierces through all disguises, and is the worship of spirit for spirit at the very root of being; such love is not lightly conceived or easily given; it is not born of chance companionship, of fleshly desire, of a craving to share the happiness of a buoyant spirit of sunshine and sweetness; it is rather nurtured in gloom and sadness, it demands a corresponding depth and intensity, it requires to discern in its lover a deep passion for the beauty of virtue.  It is one of the triumphs of Jane Eyre that the love she feels for Mr. Rochester pierces through those very superficial vices which would be most abhorrent to the pure nature, if it were not for the certainty that such vice was the disguise and not the essence of the soul.  And here lies, I think, the uplifting hopefulness of Jane Eyre, the Christ-like power of recognising the ardent spirit of love behind gross faults of both the animal and the intellectual nature.