A horror of great darkness fell upon me; I felt my chamber invaded by one I had known formerly, but had thought for ever departed.  I was temporarily a prey to hypochondria.  She had been my acquaintance, nay, my guest, once before in boyhood; I had entertained her at bed and board for a year; for that space of time I had her to myself in secret; she lay with me, she ate with me, she walked out with me, showing me nooks in woods, hollows in hills, where we could sit together, and where she could drop her drear veil over me, and so hide sky and sun, grass and green tree; taking me entirely to her death-cold bosom, and holding me with arms of bone.  What tales she would tell me at such hours!  What songs she would recite in my ears!  How she would discourse to me of her own country—­the grave—­and again and again promise to conduct me there ere long; and drawing me to the very brink of a black, sullen river, show me, on the other side, shores unequal with mound, monument, and tablet, standing up in a glimmer more hoary than moonlight.  “Necropolis!” she would whisper, pointing to the pale piles, and add, “It contains a mansion prepared for you.”

Finely imagined—­finely said!  It has the ring and weird mystery of De Quincey.  There are phrases that Thackeray would not have used, such as jar on the ear and betray an immature taste.  “Necropolis” is a strange affectation when “City of the Dead” was at hand; and “pointing to the pale piles” is a hideous alliteration.  But in spite of such immaturities (and the writer never saw the text in type) the passage shows wonderful power of language and sense of music in prose.  How fine is the sentence, “taking me to her death-cold bosom, and holding me with arms of bone,” and that of the tombstones, “in a glimmer more hoary than moonlight” Coleridge might have used such a phrase in the Ancient Mariner or in Christabel.  Yet these were the thoughts and the words of a lonely girl of thirty as she watched the dreary churchyard at Haworth from the windows of its unlovely parsonage.

This vivid power of painting in words is specially called forth by the look of nature and the scenes she describes.  Charlotte Bronte had, in the highest degree, that which Ruskin has called the “pathetic fallacy,” the eye which beholds nature coloured by the light of the inner soul.  In this quality she really reaches the level of fine poetry.  Her intense sympathy with her native moors and glens is akin to that of Wordsworth.  She almost never attempts to describe any scenery with which she is not deeply familiar.  But how wonderfully she catches the tone of her own moorland, skies, storm-winds, secluded hall or cottage!