“’From my youth up Thy terrors have I suffered with a troubled mind.’”

The deep interest of this experience is that it was endured by one who was not only intellectually endowed beyond most women of her time, but whose sanity, reasonableness, and moral force were conspicuously strong.  Charlotte Bronte was not one of those impulsive and imaginative women who are the prey of every fancy.  Throughout the whole of her career, she was for ever compelling her frail and sensitive temperament, with indomitable purpose, to perform whatever she had undertaken to do.  There never was anyone who lived so sternly by principle and reason, or who so maintained her self-control in the face of sorrow, disaster, unhappiness, and bereavement.  She never gave way to feeble or morbid self-accusation, and therefore the fact that she could thus have suffered is a sign that this unnamed terror can coexist with a dauntless courage and an essential self-command.

Here again is the cry of a desolate heart!  She had been going through her sisters’ papers not long after their death, and wrote to her great friend: 

“I am both angry and surprised at myself for not being in better spirits; for not growing accustomed, or at least resigned, to the solitude and isolation of my lot.  But my late occupation left a result, for some days and indeed still, very painful.  The reading over of papers, the renewal of remembrances, brought back the pangs of bereavement and occasioned a depression of spirits well-nigh intolerable.  For one or two nights I hardly knew how to get on till morning; and when morning came I was still haunted by a sense of sickening distress.  I tell you these things because it is absolutely necessary to me to have some relief.  You will forgive me and not trouble yourself, or imagine that I am one whit worse than I say.  It is quite a mental ailment, and I believe and hope is better now.  I think so, because I can speak about it, which I never can when grief is at its worst.  I thought to find occupation and interest in writing when alone at home, but hitherto my efforts have been in vain:  the deficiency of every stimulus is so complete.  You will recommend me, I dare say, to go from home; but that does no good, even could I again leave papa with an easy mind. . . .  I cannot describe what a time of it I had after my return from London and Scotland.  There was a reaction that sank me to the earth, the deadly silence, solitude, depression, desolation were awful; the craving for companionship, the hopelessness of relief were what I should dread to feel again.”

Or again, in a somewhat calmer mood, she writes: