ve me sat the rising moon; pale yet as a cloud, but
brightening momently; she looked over Hay which, half lost in trees,
sent up a blue smoke from its few chimneys; it was yet a mile distant,
but in the absolute hush I could hear plainly its thin murmurs of life.
My ear, too, felt the flow of currents; in what dales and depths I could
not tell: but there were many hills beyond Hay, and doubtless many becks
threading their passes. That evening calm betrayed alike the tinkle of
the nearest streams, the sough of the most remote.

"A rude noise broke on these fine ripplings and whisperings, at once so
far away and so clear: a positive tramp, tramp; a metallic clatter,
which effaced the soft wave-wanderings; as, in a picture, the solid mass
of a crag, or the rough boles of a great oak, drawn in dark and strong
on the foreground, efface the aerial distance of azure hill, sunny
horizon, and blended clouds, where tint melts into tint.

"The din sounded on the causeway...."

Flawless this, too, of the sky after sunset: "Where the sun had gone
down in simple state--pure of the pomp of clouds--spread a solemn
purple, burning with the light of red jewel and furnace flame at one
point, on one hill-peak, and extending high and wide, soft and still
softer, over half heaven."

And this of her own moors: "There are great moors behind and on each
hand of me; there are waves of mountains far beyond that deep valley at
my feet. The population here must be thin, and I see no passengers on
these roads: they stretch out east, west, north and south--white, broad,
lonely; they are all cut in the moor, and the heather grows deep and
wild to their very verge."

She has given the secret of the moor country in a phrase: "I felt the
consecration of its loneliness." In that one line you have the real, the
undying Charlotte Bronte.

It is such immortal things that make the difference between _Jane Eyre_
and _The Professor_. So immeasurable is that difference that it almost
justifies the theorist in assuming an "experience" to account for it, an
experience falling between the dates of _The Professor_ and _Jane Eyre_.
Unfortunately there was none; none in the sense cherished by the
researcher. Charlotte's letters are an unbroken record of those two
years that followed her return from Brussels. Her life is laid bare in
its long and cramped monotony, a life singularly empty of "experience".

And yet an experience did come to her in that brief perio