went down amongst the trees,
and sank crimson and clear behind them.

How admirable is this icy hush of nature in breathless expectation of
the first coming of the master of Thornfield--of the master of Jane
herself. And yet, how simple in phrase, how pure, how Wordsworthian in
its sympathy with earth even in her most bare and sober hues! And then
that storm which ushers in the story of the Vampyre woman tearing
Jane's wedding veil at her bedside, when "the clouds drifted from pole
to pole, fast following, mass on mass." And as Jane watches the
shivered chestnut-tree, "black and riven, the trunk, split down the
centre, gasped ghastly"--a strange but powerful alliteration. "The
moon appeared momentarily in that part of the sky which filled the
fissure; her disk was blood-red and half overcast; she seemed to throw
on me one bewildered, dreary glance, and buried herself again instantly
in the deep drift of cloud." An admirable overture to that terrific
scene of the mad wife's visit to the rival's bed.

Charlotte Bronte is great in clouds, like a prose Shelley. We all
recall that mysterious storm in which _Villette_ darkly closes, and
with it the expected bridegroom of Lucy Snowe--

The wind takes its autumn moan; but--he is coming. The skies hang full
and dark--a rack sails from the west; the clouds cast themselves into
strange forms--arches and broad radiations; there rise resplendent
mornings--glorious, royal, purple as monarch in his state; the heavens
are one flame; so wild are they, they rival battle at its thickest--so
bloody, they shame Victory in her pride. . . . When the sun returned
his light was night to some!

And into that night Lucy's master, lover, husband has for ever passed.

This sympathy with nature, and this power to invest it with feeling for
the human drama of which it is the scene, lifts little Charlotte Bronte
into the company of the poets. No one, however, can enter into all the
art of her landscapes unless he knows those Yorkshire moors, the
straggling upland villages, bare, cold, gray, uncanny, with low,
unlovely stone buildings, and stern church towers and graveyards,
varied with brawling brooks and wooded glens, and here and there a grim
manor-house that had seen war. It is so often that the dwellers in the
least picturesque and smiling countries are found to love their native
country best and to invest it with the most enduring art. And the
pilgrims to Haworth Parsonage h