For, though that morbid excitement and introspection belonged solely to Charlotte’s days of exile, Miss Nussey was at the bottom of it.  Mary Taylor would have been a far robuster influence.  But Charlotte’s friendship for Mary Taylor, warm as it was, strikes cold beside her passionate affection for Ellen Nussey.  She brought her own fire to that, and her own extraordinary capacity for pain.  Her letters show every phase of this friendship, its birth, its unfolding; and then the sudden leaping of the flame, its writhing and its torture.  She writes with a lover’s ardour and impatience.  “Write to me very soon and dispel my uncertainty, or I shall get impatient, almost irritable.”  “I read your letter with dismay.  Ellen—­what shall I do without you?  Why are we to be denied each other’s society?  It is an inscrutable fatality....  Why are we to be divided?” (She is at Roe Head, and Roe Head suggests the answer.) “Surely, Ellen, it must be because we are in danger of loving each other too well—­of losing sight of the Creator in idolatry of the creature.”  She prays to be resigned, and records “a sweet, placid sensation like those that I remember used to visit me when I was a little child, and on Sunday evenings in summer stood by the window reading the life of a certain French nobleman who attained a purer and higher degree of sanctity than has been known since the days of the Early Martyrs.  I thought of my own Ellen—­” “I wish I could see you, my darling; I have lavished the warmest affections of a very hot tenacious heart upon you; if you grow cold, it is over.”  She was only twenty-one.

A few more years and the leaping and the writhing and the torture cease, the fire burns to a steady, inextinguishable glow.  There is gaiety in Charlotte’s tenderness.  She is “infuriated” on finding a jar in her trunk.  “At first I hoped it was empty, but when I found it heavy and replete, I could have hurled it all the way back to Birstall.  However, the inscription A.B. softened me much.  You ought first to be tenderly kissed, and then as tenderly whipped.  Emily is just now sitting on the floor of the bedroom where I am writing, looking at her apples.  She smiled when I gave them and the collar as your presents, with an expression at once well pleased and slightly surprised.”

The religious fervours and the soul-searchings have ceased long ago, so has Miss Nussey’s brief spiritual ascendency.  But the friendship and the letters never cease.  They go on for twenty years, through exile and suffering, through bereavement, through fame and through marriage, uninterrupted and, except for one brief period, unabridged.  There is nothing in any biography to compare with those letters to Ellen Nussey.  If Charlotte Bronte had not happened to be a great genius as well as a great woman, they alone would have furnished forth her complete biography.  There is no important detail of her mere life that is not given in them.  Mrs. Gaskell relied almost entirely on them, and on