But you can see her fearful and reluctant youth yielding at last to Emily’s thought, until she caught a glimpse of the “repose” beyond the clash of “conquered good and conquering ill”.  You can see how the doctrine of eternal punishment went by the board; how Anne, who had gone through agonies of orthodox fear on account of Branwell, must have adjusted things somehow, and arrived at peace.  Trust in “the merits of the Redeemer” is, after all, trust in the Immensity beyond Redeemer and redeemed.  Of this trust she sang in a voice, like her material voice, fragile, but sweet and true.  She sang naively of the “Captive Dove” that makes unheard its “joyless moan”, of “the heart that Nature formed to love”, pining, “neglected and alone”.  She sang of the “Narrow Way”, “Be it,” she sings, “thy constant aim

  “To labour and to love,
    To pardon and endure,
  To lift thy heart to God above,
    And keep thy conscience pure.”

She hears the wind in an alien wood and cries for the Parsonage garden, and for the “barren hills”: 

  Where scarce the scattered, stunted trees
    Can yield an answering swell,
  But where a wilderness of heath
    Returns the sound as well.

  For yonder garden, fair and wide,
    With groves of evergreen,
  Long winding walks, and borders trim
    And velvet lawns between.

  Restore to me that little spot,
    With grey hills compassed round,
  Where knotted grass neglected lies,
    And weeds usurp the ground.

For she, too, loved the moors; and through her love for them she wrote two perfect lines when she called on Memory to

  Forever hang thy dreamy spell
  Round mountain star and heather-bell.

The critics, the theorists, the tale-mongers, have left Anne quiet in that grave on the sea-coast, where she lies apart.  Her gentle insignificance served her well.

* * * * *

But no woman who ever wrote was more criticized, more spied upon, more lied about, than Charlotte.  It was as if the singular purity and poverty of her legend offered irresistible provocation.  The blank page called for the scribbler.  The silence that hung about her was dark with challenge; it was felt to be ambiguous, enigmatic.  Reserve suggests a reservation, something hidden and kept back from the insatiable public with its “right to know”.  Mrs. Gaskell with all her indiscretions had not given it enough.  The great classic Life of Charlotte Bronte was, after all, incomplete.  Until something more was known about her, Charlotte herself was incomplete.  It was nothing that Mrs. Gaskell’s work was the finest, tenderest portrait of a woman that it was ever given to a woman to achieve; nothing that she was not only recklessly and superbly loyal to Charlotte, but that in her very indiscretions she was, as far as Charlotte was concerned, incorruptibly and profoundly true.