n raised to the _n_th power. Take the
description of the awful red room at Gateshead.

"A bed supported on massive pillars of mahogany, hung with curtains of
deep red damask, stood out like a tabernacle in the centre; the two
large windows with their blinds always drawn down, were half shrouded in
festoons and falls of similar drapery; the carpet was red; the table at
the foot of the bed was covered with a crimson cloth; the walls were a
soft fawn colour, with a flush of pink in it; the wardrobe, the
toilet-table, the chairs were of darkly-polished old mahogany. Out of
these deep surrounding shades rose high and glared white the piled-up
mattresses and pillows of the bed, spread with a snowy Marseilles
counterpane. Scarcely less prominent was an ample, cushioned easy-chair
near the head of the bed, also white, with a footstool before it; and
looking, as I thought, like a pale throne.... Mr. Reed had been dead
nine years: it was in this chamber he breathed his last; here he lay in
state; hence his coffin was borne by the undertaker's men; and since
that day a sense of dreary consecration had guarded it from frequent
intrusion."

Could anything be more horrible than that red room? Or take the
descriptions of the school at Lowood where the horror of pestilence
hangs over house and garden. Through all these Gateshead and Lowood
scenes Charlotte is unerring and absolute in her reality.

Her very style, so uncertain in its rendering of human speech, becomes
flawless in such passages as this: "It was three o'clock; the
church-bell tolled as I passed under the belfry: the charm of the hour
lay in its approaching dimness, in the low-gliding and pale-beaming sun.
I was a mile from Thornfield, in a lane noted for wild roses in summer,
for nuts and blackberries in autumn, and even now possessing a few coral
treasures in hips and haws, but whose best winter delight lay in its
utter solitude and leafless repose. If a breath of air stirred, it made
no sound here; for there was not a holly, not an evergreen to rustle,
and the stripped hawthorn and hazel bushes were as still as the white,
worn stones which causewayed the middle of the path. Far and wide, on
each side, there were only fields, where no cattle now browsed; and the
little brown birds, which stirred occasionally in the hedge, looked like
single russet leaves about to drop.

"This lane inclined up-hill all the way to Hay.... I then turned
eastward.

"On the hill-top abo