the effects of opium as she does in ‘Villette,’ she replied that she knew nothing of opium, but that she had followed the process she always adopted in cases of this kind.  She had thought intently on the matter for many a night before falling asleep; till at length, after some time, she waked in the morning with all clear before her, just as if she had actually gone through the experience, and then could describe it word for word as it happened.

Her sensitiveness to impressions of nature was exceedingly keen.  She had what Swinburne calls “an instinct for the tragic use of landscape.”  By constant and close observation during her walks she had established a fellowship with nature in all her phases; learning her secrets from the voices of the night, from the whisper of the trees, and from the eerie moaning of the moorland blasts.  She studied the cold sky, and had watched the “coming night-clouds trailing low like banners drooping.”

Other qualities that distinguish her work are purity, depth and ardor of passion, and spiritual force and fervor.  Her genius was lofty and noble, and an exalted moral quality predominates in her stories.  She was ethical as sincerely as she was emotional.

We have only to consider her technique, in which she is characteristically original.  This originality is noticeable especially in her use of words.  There is a sense of fitness that often surprises the reader.  Words at times in her hands reveal a new power and significance.  In the choice of words Charlotte Bronte was scrupulous.  She believed that there was just one word fit to express the idea or shade of meaning she wished to convey, and she never admitted a substitute, sometimes waiting days until the right word came.  Her expressions are therefore well fitted and forcible.  Though the predominant key is a serious one, there is nevertheless considerable humor in Charlotte Bronte’s work.  In ‘Shirley’ especially we find many happy scenes, and much wit in repartee.  And yet, with all these merits, one will find at times her style to be lame, stiff, and crude, and even when strongest, occasionally coarse.  Not infrequently she is melodramatic and sensational.  But through it all there is that pervading sense of reality and it redeems these defects.

Of the unusual, the improbable, the highly colored in Charlotte Bronte’s books we shall say little.  In criticizing works so true to life and nature as these, one should not be hasty.  We feel the presence of a seer.  Some one once made an objection in Charlotte Bronte’s presence to that part of ‘Jane Eyre’ in which she hears Rochester’s voice calling to her at a great crisis in her life, he being many miles distant from her at the time.  Charlotte caught her breath and replied in a low voice:—­“But it is a true thing; it really happened.”  And so it might be said of Charlotte Bronte’s work as a whole:—­“It is a true thing; it really happened.”

JANE EYRE’S WEDDING DAY