A re-reading of her works is always a new amazing of her reader who turns back to review the harvest of her English.  It must have been with rapture that she claimed her own simplicity.  And with what a moderation, how temperately, and how seldom she used her mastery!  To the last she has an occasional attachment to her bonds; for she was not only fire and air.  In one passage of her life she may remind us of the little colourless and thrifty hen-bird that Lowell watched nest-building with her mate, and cutting short the flutterings and billings wherewith he would joyously interrupt the business; Charlotte’s nesting bird was a clergyman.  He came, lately affianced, for a week’s visit to her parsonage, and she wrote to her friend before his arrival:  “My little plans have been disarranged by an intimation that Mr.—­is coming on Monday”; and afterwards, in reference to her sewing, “he hindered me for a full week.”

In alternate pages Villette is a book of spirit and fire, and a novel of illiberal rancour, of ungenerous, uneducated anger, ungentle, ignoble.  In order to forgive its offences, we have to remember in its author’s favour not her pure style set free, not her splendour in literature, but rather the immeasurable sorrow of her life.  To read of that sorrow again is to open once more a wound which most men perhaps, certainly most women, received into their hearts in childhood.  For the Life of Charlotte Bronte is one of the first books of biography put into the hands of a child, to whom Jane Eyre is allowed only in passages.  We are young when we first hear in what narrow beds “the three are laid”—­the two sisters and the brother—­and in what a bed of living insufferable memories the one left lay alone, reviewing the hours of their death—­alone in the sealed house that was only less narrow than their graves.  The rich may set apart and dedicate a room, the poor change their street, but Charlotte Bronte, in the close captivity of the fortunes of mediocrity, rested in the chair that had been her dying sister’s, and held her melancholy bridals in the dining room that had been the scene of terrible and reluctant death.

But closer than the conscious house was the conscious mind.  Locked with intricate wards within the unrelaxing and unlapsing thoughts of this lonely sister, dwelt a sorrow inconsolable.  It is well for the perpetual fellowship of mankind that no child should read this life and not take therefrom a perdurable scar, albeit her heart was somewhat frigid towards childhood, and she died before her motherhood could be born.