EMILY BRONTL*

Tins volume, which belongs to the Eminent Women Series, is to a great extent a compilation from other works already published relating to the Brontë family ; and the author's object is to give, as far as possible, a portrait only of the fourth daughter, Emily.

So closely was her life bound up with that of her family that the book is necessarily a picture of a group rather than of a single individual ; yet, on the whole, to the one whose name it bears has been assigned a sufficiently prominent place to justify her being regarded as the heroine. The leading characteristics which she, her brother, and four sisters inherited from their parents were strong will from the Irish father, and consumption from the Cornish mother. From infancy her circumstances seem to have been of a kind adapted to inculcate that stern self-repression, and intense concentration of affection upon the few people with whom she had familiar intercourse, for which she was distinguished. Living in a small house, where there were an anxious, irritable father and a dying mother to be considered, and where the stone floors echoed to every sound, the children were accustomed to think nothing so necessary as that they should amuse themselves in quiet and keep out of the way. But if this state of hushed calm and restraint reigned amongst them perforce while in the house, it was a very different matter outside, where they could ramble to their hearts' content upon the great, bleak, wild Yorkshire moors, enjoy perfect liberty, and study the face of Nature undisturbed by the society of any human beings except themselves. Thus Emily's earliest recollections were "a constant necessity of keeping joys and sorrows quiet, not letting others hear ; the equal love of children for one another, the only five children that she knew in the world ; the free, wide moors, where she might go as she pleased, and where the rabbits played, the moor game ran, and the wild birds sang and flew." When Mrs. Bronte died, in 1821, her eldest daughter, Maria, an old-fashioned, motherly little girl of seven, with tender, thoughtful ways, took care of the five younger babies, " protecting her little family with gentle love, and discussing the debates in Parliament with her father." Even at that early age the children had developed an aptitude for writing stories and plays which denoted imaginations rather precocious than healthy. Their mother's sicknurse says :

" You would not have known there was a child in the house, they were such still, noiseless, good little creatures. Maria would shut herself up in the children's study with a newspaper, and be able to tell one everything when she came out ; debates in Parliament, and I don't know what all. She was as good as a mother to her sisters and brother. But there never were such good children."

Mr. Brontë, though not unkind, troubled himself but very little about his young family. He forbade their having meat to eat, or associating with the village children ; but seems otherwise to have left them to do as they pleased, with the moors for a playground, newspapers for literature, and the seven-year-old, loving Maria for chief guardian. So we read that " they-devised plays about great men, read the newspapers, worshipped the Duke of Wellington, and strolled about the moors at their own sweet will, knowing of and caring for absolutely no creature outside the walls of their own home." Altogether, Emily's early life *seems to have been peculiarly adapted to help to mould the solitary, shy, silent woman that she eventually became ; unswerving of purpose, rugged ; passionately attached to liberty, to all animals, and to her family ; so fond of home that whenever away she could not help being heart-sick for it, and never getting reconciled to the jarring strangeness of other places.

A year after the mother's death, a new element was introduced into Emily's life by the arrival of a prim, snuff-taking, maiden aunt, from Penzance, who taught the girls sewing, dusting,

pudding-making, and similar domestic duties, and probably laid the foundation of the talent for housekeeping that Emily developed in later life. Then, when only six years old, she and her three elder sisters were sent to the horrible Cowan's Bridge School, which supplied the original of Lowood in Jane Ego:. At this grim, cold, and hungry charity school, managed by a

man who " deliberately ignored the apple-and-pegtop side of child-nature," and where the miserable scholars were ill-fed, ill-lodged, ill-clothed, and harshly treated, everything must have tended to increase rather than to counteract the stern, self-concentrated, repressing influences of her earlier training ; and, by proving fatal to her two eldest sisters, the school did yet more to confirm her in her previous habits, by thus cutting off two from the already narrow circle of those whom she loved, and in whose company her nature could expand itself. So wild, unsociable, and untractable had she become by the time she was sixteen, that her sister Charlotte could not, with out great misgivings, send her out walking for the first time alone with Miss Nussey, Charlotte's own friend, and on their return from the walk immediately drew aside the visitor, to ask eagerly, "How did Emily behave ?" A young lady of this dis position could hardly be expected to prove otherwise than formidable to Mr. Bronte's curates, and we are told that if by

chance they found her instead of her father in his study, they would beat a retreat so hastily as to make it an established joke at -the parsonage that she appeared to the outer world in the likeness of an old bear. Notwithstanding this ruggedness, however, fidelity to old friends was a marked feature in her character, as well as in that of her sisters, as was shown by their conduct when their old servant Tabby broke her leg : " She was already nearly seventy, and could do little work ; now her accident laid her completely aside, leaving Emily, Charlotte, and Anne to spend their Christmas holidays in doing the housework and nursing the invalid. Miss Branwell, anxious to spare the girls' hands and her brother-in-law's pocket, insisted that Tabby should be sent to her sister's house to be nursed, and another servant engaged for the Parsonage. Tabby, she represented, was fairly well off, her sister in comfortable circumstances ; the Parsonage kitchen might, supply her with broths and jellies in plenty, but why waste the girls' leisure and scanty patrimony on an old servant competent to keep herself ? Mr. Bronte was finally persuaded, and his decision made known. But the girls were not persuaded. Tabby, so they averred, was one of the family, and they refused to abandon her in sickness. They did not say much, but they did more than say—they starved. When the tea was served, the three sat silent, fasting. Next morning found their will yet stronger than their hunger—no breakfast. They did the day's work, and dinner came. Still they held out, wan and sunk. Then the superiors gave in."

The practical and the imaginative were ever curiously blended in Emily, and both kept in constant action by the resolute, energetic spirit that made determined work as natural to her as breath, A capital housekeeper was this woman of remarkable genius; her bread was famed throughout Haworth for its lightness and excellence, and whilst she kneaded the dough she

would study German from a book propped open in front of her, and have a scrap of paper and pencil at her side wherewith to jot down any thought worth remembering that might occur.

There was a sort of double life always going on in her, of which Miss Nussey appears to have derived some inkling from observing the way in which Emily would he affected by wild Irish tales of horror, which Mr. Brontë loved to relate at breakfast, and which made the visitor's blood run cold as she listened.

Far different, however, was their effect on Emily, for Miss Nussey tells us that,— "Sometimes she marvelled as she caught sight of Emily's face, relaxed from its company rigour, while she stooped down to hand her porridge-bowl to the dog : she wore a strange expression, gratified, pleased, as though she had gained something which seemed to complete a picture in her mind. For this silent Emily, talking little save in rare bursts of will spirits ; this energetic housewife, cooking and cleaning as though she had no other aim in view than the providing for the day's comfort; this was the same Emily who at five years of age used to startle the nursery with her fantastic fairy-stories. Two lives went on side by side in her heart, neither ever mingling with or interrupting the other. Practical housewife with capable hands, dreamer of strange horrors : each self was independent of the companion to which it was linked by day and night."

We have dwelt so long on the impressions which Emily's nature received whilst in its earliest and most malleable stage, that we have no space here to follow the processes by which it was subsequently shaped and developed. Yet we cannot conclude this notice without alluding to the evil genius of the family, her brother Patrick, dissolute, drunken, opium-eating, and goodfor-nothing. Painful as the subject is, it is none the less necessary to be taken into account, by whoever seeks to understand the history of the sister who ever gave him sisterly love and loyalty, in spite of sin, degradation, and excesses which she abhorred, and for which she was forced to suffer. A baneful and abiding element in her life, it was from him that was partly taken the character of Heathcliff, the weird, unique hero of lirathering Heights, a book which, whether or no wholly satisfactory to all tastes, must at all events be universally admitted

to be entirely original ; a hovel standing by itself, and neither founded on nor borrowed from, any other work. Weak as Patrick was, yet he showed himself in death to be not altogether destitute of the strong family will. When the last moment came,—

" He would die as he thought no one had ever died before, standing. So, like some ancient Celtic hero, when the last agony began, he rose to his feet ; hushed and awe-stricken, the old father, praying Anne, loving Emily, looked on. Ile rose to his feet and died erect, after twenty minutes' struggle:"

The nature of Miss Robinson's theme makes her book at once sal and interesting, as any account of Emily Brontii must in evitably be. It is the record of the life of a rarely-gifted, loving, lonely woman, of indomitable will and dauntless courage.

Wealth, ease, pleasure, domestic joys, success in plans, fame, all these things were denied her ; and she might well have echoed Faust's bitter cry that "Bathe/wen eollsf du, sollst eiztbehren !"

was the doom imposed upon her.Yet she never gave way under her troubles. She would seem always, like Goethe's Iphigenie, to have been impelled onwards by the thought, "Der vorttitrts sieht, tole hied loch iibrig bleibt," and so to the last

breath she fought gallantly with soul and body, and was true to herself.

she writes, in one of her poems; and to such a soul as she desired, she seems in truth to have attained. Is it admiration, love, or pity, that should predominate in the feeling of posterity towards her, as they learn to know her as she really was ?,