People who live in beautiful, quiet valleys, where roses bloom all the year through, are not necessarily happy.

Southern California—­the Garden of Eden of the world—­evolves just as many cases per capita of melancholia as bleak, barren Maine.  Wild, rocky, forbidding Scotland has produced more genius to the acre than beautiful England:  and I have found that sailor Jack, facing the North Atlantic winter storms, year after year, is a deal jollier companion than the Florida cracker whose chief adversary is the mosquito.

Charlotte Bronte wrote three great books:  “Jane Eyre,” “Shirley” and “Villette.”  From the lonely, bleak parsonage on that stony hillside she sent forth her swaying filament of thought and lassoed the world.  She lived to know that she had won.  Money came to her, all she needed, honors, friends and lavish praise.  She was the foremost woman author of her day.  Her name was on every tongue.  She had met the world in fair fight; without patrons, paid advocates, or influential friends she made her way to the very front.  Her genius was acknowledged.  She accomplished all that she set out to do and more—­far more.  The great, the learned, the titled, the proud—­all those who reverence the tender heart and far-reaching mind—­acknowledged her as queen.

So why prate of her sorrows!  Did she not work them up into art?  Why weep over her troubles when these were the weapons with which she won?  Why sit in sackcloth on account of her early death, when it is appointed unto all men once to die, and with her the grave was swallowed up in victory?

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI

    My life is but a working-day,
      Whose tasks are set aright: 
    A while to work, a while to pray,
      And then a quiet night. 
    And then, please God, a quiet night
    Where Saints and Angels walk in white. 
    One dreamless sleep from work and sorrow,
    But reawakening on the morrow.
                         —­In Patience

[Illustration:  Christina Rossetti]

As a study in heredity, the Rossetti family is most interesting.  Genius seems so sporadic a stuff that when we find an outcrop along the line of a whole family we are wont to mark it on memory’s chart in red.  We talk of the Herschels, of Renan and his sister, of the Beechers, and the Fields, in a sort of awe, mindful that Nature is parsimonious in giving out transcendent talent, and may never do the like again.  So who can forget the Rossettis—­two brothers, Dante Gabriel and William Michael, and two sisters, Maria and Christina—­each of whom stands forth as far above the ordinary, yet all strangely dependent upon one another?