I loved this world — I longed to see it happy — I did all I could to please whom I could — I gave myself to one who promised what he did not perform — I still kept to my promises and smiled away sorrow when I could, or hid it when misery overmastered the smile — Through all I felt blameless and could each night place my trust in Thee. What, then, can I do now? I cannot hate him — I cannot forget him — He has made me love him, and yet I must cast his image aside or live, a traitor to my vow, and a sinner in thy sight.
“My God, I cannot cast him aside! I should lie if I promised it — I long to be his own,but I have, through my life longed to be Thine own. I cannot be both, and now I must try to long to be in my grave.
Where, my God, is thy compassion, and why is it denied to me? Am I doomed to an endless agony; and, if so, wherefore am I doomed? I am as thou hast formed me — I feel as thou hast caused me — I act as thou permittest — I suffer what thou willest — I am thine with whom to do what thou pleasest — but — I am another’s also!
Forgive me if I pray for him this night when I shall not dare to pray for myself. Forgive me if my eyes turn from the daily repeated scene of sorrow to the seldom coming hour of joy. I ask Thee to forgive me but I dare not hope it, so I must entirely trust myself to my darkening fate and to Thine own almighty power!”
Mrs Thurstons white forehead and raven curls were turned toward heaven as she rose with streaming eyes — she dried them with a white handkercheif which she thought her own, but flushed as she noticed the letters “A.P.” IN THE CORNER, AND THEN hurriedly left the room to try to fulfill her duties.
Branwell Brontë
A self-portrait
BRANWELL’S POETRY
Brother to the famous Brontë sisters, Branwell was a painter and poet. He was the only son of the Brontë family, but his literary works never achieved the interest or success of his sisters, and later in life he became addicted to alcohol and laudanum. His severe addictions masked the onset of tuberculosis, and his family did not realise that he was seriously ill until he collapsed outside the house and a local doctor identified him as being in the disease’s terminal stages. He died shortly afterwards.
Self caricature of Branwell in bed waiting to die, 1847
CONTENTS
Lydia Gisborne
Penmaenmawr (excerpt)
Sir Henry Tunstall (excerpt)
Thorp Green
Lydia Gisborne
On Ouse’s grassy banks - last Whitsuntide,
I sat, with fears and pleasures, in my soul
Commingled, as ‘it roamed without control,’
O’er present hours and through a future wide
Where love, me thought, should keep, my heart beside
Her, whose own prison home I looked upon:
But, as I looked, descended summer’s sun,
And did not its descent my hopes deride?
The sky though blue was soon to change to grey -
I, on that day, next year must own no smile -
And as those waves, to Humber far away,
Were gliding - so, though that hour might beguile
My Hopes, they too, to woe’s far deeper sea,
Rolled past the shores of Joy’s now dim and distant isle.
Penmaenmawr (excerpt)
I knew a flower whose leaves were meant to bloom
Till Death should snatch it to adorn the tomb,
Now, blanching ‘neath the blight of hopeless grief
With never blooming and yet living leaf;
A flower on which my mind would wish to shine,
If but one beam could break from mind like mine:
I had an ear which could on accents dwell
That might as well say ‘perish’ as ‘farewell’ -
An eye which saw, far off, a tender form
Beaten, unsheltered, by affliction’s storm -
An arm - a lip - that trembled to embrace
My Angel’s gentle breast and sorrowing face
A mind that clung to Ouse’s fertile side
While tossing - objectless - on Menai’s tide!
Sir Henry Tunstall (excerpt)
They fancied, when they saw me home returning,
That all my soul to meet with them was yearning,
That every wave I’d bless which bore me hither;
They thought my spring of life could never wither.
That in the dry the green leaf I could keep,
As pliable as youth to laugh or weep;
They did not think how oft my eyesight turned
Toward the skies where Indian Sunshine burned,
That I had perhaps left an associate band,
That I had farewells even for that wild Land;
They did not think my head and heart were older,
My strength more broken and my feelings colder,
That spring was hastening into autumn sere -
And leafless trees make loveliest prospects drear -
That sixteen years the same ground travel o’er
Till each wears out the mark which each has left before.
Thorp Green
I sit, this evening, far away,
From all I used to know,
And nought reminds my soul to-day
Of happy long ago.
Unwelcome cares, unthought-of fears,
Around my room arise;
I seek for suns of former years
But clouds o’ercast my skies.
Yes-Memory, wherefore does thy voice
Bring old times back to view,
As thou wouldst bid me not rejoice
In thoughts and prospects new?
I’ll thank thee, Memory, in the hour
When troubled thoughts are mine-
For thou, like suns in April’s shower,
On shadowy scenes wilt shine.
I’ll thank thee when approaching death
Would quench life’s feeble ember,
For thou wouldst even renew my breath
With thy sweet word ‘Remember’!
The Biographies
THE LIFE OF CHARLOTTE BRONTË by Elizabeth Gaskell
This posthumous biography by Elizabeth Gaskell was first published in 1857. One of the major sources was the hundreds of letters sent by Brontë to her lifelong friend Ellen Nussey, which Gaskell spent many months sifting through. The biography is clear and often very telling, yet Gaskell suppressed details of Charlotte’s love for Constantin Héger, a married man, due to contemporary morals and in fear of distressing Charlotte’s still-living friends, father and husband.
Elizabeth Gaskell, the famous novelist and biographer
CONTENTS
VOLUME I
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
VOLUME II
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIV.
VOLUME I
CHAPTER I
The Leeds and Skipton railway runs along a deep valley of the Aire; a slow and sluggish stream, compared to the neighbouring river of Wharfe. Keighley station is on this line of railway, about a quarter of a mile from the town of the same name. The number of inhabitants and the importance of Keighley have been very greatly increased during the last twenty years, owing to the rapidly extended market for worsted manufactures, a branch of industry that mainly employs the factory population of this part of Yo
rkshire, which has Bradford for its centre and metropolis.
Keighley is in process of transformation from a populous, old-fashioned village, into a still more populous and flourishing town. It is evident to the stranger, that as the gable-ended houses, which obtrude themselves corner-wise on the widening street, fall vacant, they are pulled down to allow of greater space for traffic, and a more modern style of architecture. The quaint and narrow shop-windows of fifty years ago, are giving way to large panes and plate-glass. Nearly every dwelling seems devoted to some branch of commerce. In passing hastily through the town, one hardly perceives where the necessary lawyer and doctor can live, so little appearance is there of any dwellings of the professional middle-class, such as abound in our old cathedral towns. In fact, nothing can be more opposed than the state of society, the modes of thinking, the standards of reference on all points of morality, manners, and even politics and religion, in such a new manufacturing place as Keighley in the north, and any stately, sleepy, picturesque cathedral town in the south. Yet the aspect of Keighley promises well for future stateliness, if not picturesqueness. Grey stone abounds; and the rows of houses built of it have a kind of solid grandeur connected with their uniform and enduring lines. The frame-work of the doors, and the lintels of the windows, even in the smallest dwellings, are made of blocks of stone. There is no painted wood to require continual beautifying, or else present a shabby aspect; and the stone is kept scrupulously clean by the notable Yorkshire housewives. Such glimpses into the interior as a passer-by obtains, reveal a rough abundance of the means of living, and diligent and active habits in the women. But the voices of the people are hard, and their tones discordant, promising little of the musical taste that distinguishes the district, and which has already furnished a Carrodus to the musical world. The names over the shops (of which the one just given is a sample) seem strange even to an inhabitant of the neighbouring county, and have a peculiar smack and flavour of the place.
The town of Keighley never quite melts into country on the road to Haworth, although the houses become more sparse as the traveller journeys upwards to the grey round hills that seem to bound his journey in a westerly direction. First come some villas; just sufficiently retired from the road to show that they can scarcely belong to any one liable to be summoned in a hurry, at the call of suffering or danger, from his comfortable fireside; the lawyer, the doctor, and the clergyman, live at hand, and hardly in the suburbs, with a screen of shrubs for concealment.
In a town one does not look for vivid colouring; what there may be of this is furnished by the wares in the shops, not by foliage or atmospheric effects; but in the country some brilliancy and vividness seems to be instinctively expected, and there is consequently a slight feeling of disappointment at the grey neutral tint of every object, near or far off, on the way from Keighley to Haworth. The distance is about four miles; and, as I have said, what with villas, great worsted factories, rows of workmen’s houses, with here and there an old-fashioned farmhouse and out-buildings, it can hardly be called “country” any part of the way. For two miles the road passes over tolerably level ground, distant hills on the left, a “beck” flowing through meadows on the right, and furnishing water power, at certain points, to the factories built on its banks. The air is dim and lightless with the smoke from all these habitations and places of business. The soil in the valley (or “bottom,” to use the local term) is rich; but, as the road begins to ascend, the vegetation becomes poorer; it does not flourish, it merely exists; and, instead of trees, there are only bushes and shrubs about the dwellings. Stone dykes are everywhere used in place of hedges; and what crops there are, on the patches of arable land, consist of pale, hungry-looking, grey green oats. Right before the traveller on this road rises Haworth village; he can see it for two miles before he arrives, for it is situated on the side of a pretty steep hill, with a back-ground of dun and purple moors, rising and sweeping away yet higher than the church, which is built at the very summit of the long narrow street. All round the horizon there is this same line of sinuous wave-like hills; the scoops into which they fall only revealing other hills beyond, of similar colour and shape, crowned with wild, bleak moors — grand, from the ideas of solitude and loneliness which they suggest, or oppressive from the feeling which they give of being pent-up by some monotonous and illimitable barrier, according to the mood of mind in which the spectator may be.
For a short distance the road appears to turn away from Haworth, as it winds round the base of the shoulder of a hill; but then it crosses a bridge over the “beck,” and the ascent through the village begins. The flag-stones with which it is paved are placed end-ways, in order to give a better hold to the horses’ feet; and, even with this help, they seem to be in constant danger of slipping backwards. The old stone houses are high compared to the width of the street, which makes an abrupt turn before reaching the more level ground at the head of the village, so that the steep aspect of the place, in one part, is almost like that of a wall. But this surmounted, the church lies a little off the main road on the left; a hundred yards, or so, and the driver relaxes his care, and the horse breathes more easily, as they pass into the quite little by-street that leads to Haworth Parsonage. The churchyard is on one side of this lane, the school-house and the sexton’s dwelling (where the curates formerly lodged) on the other.
The parsonage stands at right angles to the road, facing down upon the church; so that, in fact, parsonage, church, and belfried school-house, form three sides of an irregular oblong, of which the fourth is open to the fields and moors that lie beyond. The area of this oblong is filled up by a crowded churchyard, and a small garden or court in front of the clergyman’s house. As the entrance to this from the road is at the side, the path goes round the corner into the little plot of ground. Underneath the windows is a narrow flower-border, carefully tended in days of yore, although only the most hardy plants could be made to grow there. Within the stone wall, which keeps out the surrounding churchyard, are bushes of elder and lilac; the rest of the ground is occupied by a square grass-plot and a gravel walk. The house is of grey stone, two stories high, heavily roofed with flags, in order to resist the winds that might strip off a lighter covering. It appears to have been built about a hundred years ago, and to consist of four rooms on each story; the two windows on the right (as the visitor stands with his back to the church, ready to enter in at the front door) belonging to Mr. Brontë’s study, the two on the left to the family sitting-room. Everything about the place tells of the most dainty order, the most exquisite cleanliness. The door-steps are spotless; the small old-fashioned window-panes glitter like looking-glass. Inside and outside of that house cleanliness goes up into its essence, purity.
The little church lies, as I mentioned, above most of the houses in the village; and the graveyard rises above the church, and is terribly full of upright tombstones. The chapel or church claims greater antiquity than any other in that part of the kingdom; but there is no appearance of this in the external aspect of the present edifice, unless it be in the two eastern windows, which remain unmodernized, and in the lower part of the steeple. Inside, the character of the pillars shows that they were constructed before the reign of Henry VII. It is probable that there existed on this ground, a “field-kirk,” or oratory, in the earliest times; and, from the Archbishop’s registry at York, it is ascertained that there was a chapel at Haworth in 1317. The inhabitants refer inquirers concerning the date to the following inscription on a stone in the church tower: —
“Hic fecit Cænobium Monachorum Auteste fundator. A. D. sexcentissimo.”
That is to say, before the preaching of Christianity in Northumbria. Whitaker says that this mistake originated in the illiterate copying out, by some modern stone-cutter, of an inscription in the character of Henry the Eighth’s time on an adjoining stone: —
“Orate pro bono statu Eutest Tod.”
“Now every antiquary knows that the formula of prayer ‘bono statu’ always refers to t
he living. I suspect this singular Christian name has been mistaken by the stone-cutter for Austet, a contraction of Eustatius, but the word Tod, which has been mis-read for the Arabic figures 600, is perfectly fair and legible. On the presumption of this foolish claim to antiquity, the people would needs set up for independence, and contest the right of the Vicar of Bradford to nominate a curate at Haworth.”
I have given this extract, in order to explain the imaginary groundwork of a commotion which took place in Haworth about five and thirty years ago, to which I shall have occasion to allude again more particularly.
The interior of the church is commonplace; it is neither old enough nor modern enough to compel notice. The pews are of black oak, with high divisions; and the names of those to whom they belong are painted in white letters on the doors. There are neither brasses, nor altar-tombs, nor monuments, but there is a mural tablet on the right-hand side of the communion-table, bearing the following inscription: —
HERE
LIE THE REMAINS OF
MARIA BRONTË, WIFE
OF THE
REV. P. BRONTË, A.B., MINISTER OF HAWORTH.
HER SOUL
DEPARTED TO THE SAVIOUR, SEPT. 15TH, 1821,
Delphi Complete Works of the Brontes Page 373
