ts great purpose of making _her_ known and valued, as one
who had gone through such a terrible life with a brave and faithful
heart.' And that clearly Mrs. Gaskell succeeded in doing. It is quite
certain that Charlotte Bronte would not stand on so splendid a pedestal
to-day but for the single-minded devotion of her accomplished biographer.

It has sometimes been implied that the portrait drawn by Mrs. Gaskell was
far too sombre, that there are passages in Charlotte's letters which show
that ofttimes her heart was merry and her life sufficiently cheerful.
That there were long periods of gaiety for all the three sisters, surely
no one ever doubted. To few people, fortunately, is it given to have
lives wholly without happiness. And yet, when this is acknowledged, how
can one say that the picture was too gloomy? Taken as a whole, the life
of Charlotte Bronte was among the saddest in literature. At a miserable
school, where she herself was unhappy, she saw her two elder sisters
stricken down and carried home to die. In her home was the narrowest
poverty. She had, in the years when that was most essential, no mother's
care; and perhaps there was a somewhat too rigid disciplinarian in the
aunt who took the mother's place. Her second school brought her, indeed,
two kind friends; but her shyness made that school-life in itself a
prolonged tragedy. Of the two experiences as a private governess I shall
have more to say. They were periods of torture to her sensitive nature.
The ambition of the three girls to start a school on their own account
failed ignominiously. The suppressed vitality of childhood and early
womanhood made Charlotte unable to enter with sympathy and toleration
into the life of a foreign city, and Brussels was for her a further
disaster. Then within two years, just as literary fame was bringing its
consolation for the trials of the past, she saw her two beloved sisters
taken from her. And, finally, when at last a good man won her love,
there were left to her only nine months of happy married life. 'I am not
going to die. We have been so happy.' These words to her husband on her
death-bed are not the least piteously sad in her tragic story. That her
life was a tragedy, was the opinion of the woman friend with whom on the
intellectual side she had most in common. Miss Mary Taylor wrote to Mrs.
Gaskell the following letter from New Zealand upon receipt of the
_Life_:--