mall stifling room
at Haworth, and was reaped now at Cowan Bridge. First Maria, then
Elizabeth, sickened, and was sent home to die. Charlotte stayed on for a
while with Emily. She ran wild, and hung about the river, watching it,
and dabbling her feet and hands in the running water. Their doom waited
for Charlotte and for Emily.

There is no record of Elizabeth except that, like Anne Bronte, she was
"gentle". But Maria lived in Charlotte's passionate memory, and will
live for ever as Helen Burns, the school-fellow of Jane Eyre. Of those
five infant prodigies, she was the most prodigious. She was the first of
the children to go down into the vault under Haworth Church; you see her
looking back on her sad way, a small, reluctant ghost, lovely,
infantile, and yet maternal. Under her name on the flat tombstone a
verse stands, premonitory, prophetic, calling to her kindred: "Be ye
also ready."

Charlotte was nine years old when her sisters died. Tragedy tells at
nine years old. It lived all her life in her fine nerves, reinforced by
shock after shock of terror and of anguish.

But for the next seven years, spent at the Parsonage without a break,
tragedy was quiescent. Day after day, year after year passed, and
nothing happened. And the children of the Parsonage, thrown on
themselves and on each other, were exuberantly happy. They had the
freedom of the moors, and of the worlds, as wild, as gorgeous, as
lonely, as immeasurable, which they themselves created. They found out
that they were not obliged to be the children of the Parsonage; they
could be, and they were, anything they chose, from the Duke of
Wellington down to citizens of Verdopolis. For a considerable number of
years they were the "Islanders". "It was in 1827" (Charlotte, at
thirteen, records the date with gravity--it was so important) "that our
plays were established: _Young Men_, June 1826; _Our Fellows_, July
1827; _The Islanders_, December 1827. These are our three great plays
that are not kept secret."

But there were secret plays, Emily's and Charlotte's; and these you
gather to be the shy and solitary flights of Emily's and Charlotte's
genius. They seem to have required absolutely no impulsion from without.
The difficult thing for these small children was to stop writing. Their
fire consumed them, and left their bodies ashen white, fragile as ashes.
And yet they were not, they could not have been, the sedentary,
unwholesome little creatures they might s