on that subject.”  “Dear Ellen,—­I shall begin by telling you that you have no right to be angry at the length of time I have suffered to slip by since receiving your last, without answering it; because you have often kept me waiting much longer, and having made this gracious speech, thereby obviating reproaches, I will add that I think it a great shame, when you receive a long and thoroughly interesting letter, full of the sort of details you fully relish, to read the same with selfish pleasure, and not even have the manners to thank your correspondent, and express how very much you enjoyed the narrative.  I did enjoy the narrative in your last very keenly....  Which of the Miss Woolers did you see at Mr. Allbutts?”

A beautiful but most unequal friendship.  “The sort of details you fully relish—­” How that phrase must have rankled!  You can hear the passionate protest:  “Those details are not what I relish in the least.  Putting me off with your Woolers and your Allbutts!  If only you had told me about Jane Eyre!” For it turned out that all the time Mary Taylor had been told.  The inference was that Mary Taylor, with her fits of caution, could be trusted.

This silence of Charlotte’s must have been most painful and incomprehensible to the poor Ellen who was Caroline Helstone.  She had been the first to divine Charlotte’s secret; for she kept the letters.  She must have felt like some tender and worshipping wife to whom all doors in the house of the beloved are thrown open, except the door of the sanctuary, which is persistently slammed in her charming face.  There must have come to her moments of terrible insight when she felt the danger and the mystery of the flaming spirit she had tried to hold.  But Charlotte’s friend can wear her half-pathetic immortality with grace.  She could at least say:  “She told me things she never told anyone else.  I have hundreds of her letters.  And I had her heart.”

* * * * *

Nothing so much as this correspondence reveals the appalling solitude in which the Brontes lived.  Here is their dearest and most intimate friend, and she is one to whom they can never speak of the thing that interested them most.  No doubt “our best plays mean secret plays”; but Charlotte, at any rate, suffered from this secrecy.  There was nothing to counteract Miss Nussey’s direful influence on her spiritual youth.  “Papa” highly approved of the friendship.  He wished it to continue, and it did; and it was the best that Charlotte had.  I know few things more pathetic than the cry that Charlotte, at twenty-one, sent out of her solitude (with some verses) to Southey and to Wordsworth.  Southey told her that, “Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be.  The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure will she have for it, even as an accomplishment and a recreation.  To those duties you have not yet been called, and when you are you will be less eager for celebrity.”  A sound, respectable, bourgeois opinion so far, but Southey went farther.  “Write poetry for its own sake,” he said; and he could hardly have said better.  Charlotte treasured the letter, and wrote on the cover of it, “Southey’s advice, to be kept for ever.”  Wordsworth’s advice, I am sorry to say, provoked her to flippancy.