partly because he was disconcerted by the emotion he had aroused.  Her brother, a brilliant, wayward, and in some ways attractive boy, got into disgrace, and drifted home, where he tried to console himself with drink and opium.  After three years of this horrible life, he died, and within twelve months her two surviving sisters, Emily and Anne, developed consumption and died.  As Robert Browning says, there indeed was “trouble enough for one!”

Now it must be borne in mind that her temperament was naturally hypochondriacal.

Let me quote a passage dealing with the same experience; it is undoubtedly autobiographical, though it comes from Villette, into which Charlotte Bronte threw the picture of her own solitary experiences in Brussels.  She is left alone at the pensionnat in the vacation, strained by work and anxiety, and tortured by exhaustion, restlessness, and sleeplessness:—­

“One day, perceiving this growing illusion, I said, ’I really believe my nerves are getting overstretched:  my mind has suffered somewhat too much; a malady is growing upon it—­what shall I do?  How shall I keep well?’

“Indeed there was no way to keep well under the circumstances.  At last a day and night of peculiarly agonising depression were succeeded by physical illness; I took perforce to my bed.  About this time the Indian summer closed, and the equinoctial storms began; and for nine dark and wet days, of which the hours rushed on all turbulent, deaf, dishevelled—­bewildered with sounding hurricane—­I lay in a strange fever of the nerves and blood.  Sleep went quite away.  I used to rise in the night, look round for her, beseech her earnestly to return.  A rattle of the window, a cry of the blast only replied—­Sleep never came!

“I err.  She came once, but in anger.  Impatient of my importunity she brought with her an avenging dream.  By the clock of St. Jean Baptiste, that dream remained scarce fifteen minutes—­a brief space, but sufficing to wring my whole frame with unknown anguish; to confer a nameless experience that had the hue, the mien, the terror, the very tone of a visitation from eternity.  Between twelve and one that night a cup was forced to my lips, black, strong, strange, drawn from no well, but filled up seething from a bottomless and boundless sea.  Suffering, brewed in temporal or calculable measure, and mixed for mortal lips, tastes not as this suffering tasted.  Having drank [sic] and woke, I thought all was over:  the end come and passed by.  Trembling fearfully—­as consciousness returned—­ready to cry out on some fellow-creature to help me, only that I knew no fellow-creature was near enough to catch the wild summons—­Goton in her far distant attic could not hear—­I rose on my knees in bed.  Some fearful hours went over me; indescribably was I torn, racked and oppressed in mind.  Amidst the horrors of that dream I think the worst lay here.  Methought the well-loved dead, who had loved me well in life, met me elsewhere alienated; galled was my inmost spirit with an unutterable sense of despair about the future.  Motive there was none why I should try to recover or wish to live; and yet quite unendurable was the pitiless and haughty voice in which Death challenged me to engage his unknown terrors.  When I tried to pray I could only utter these words:—­