d, and it grieves me to tell
you that he is losing his sight. I have felt for some months that I
ought not to be away from him; and I feel now that it would be too
selfish to leave (at least as long as Branwell and Anne are absent) to
pursue selfish interests of my own. With the help of God I will try to
deny myself in this matter, and to wait."

And with the help of God she waited.

There are three significant entries in Emily's sealed paper for
eighteen-forty-five. "Now I don't desire a school at all, and none of us
have any great longing for it." "I am quite contented for myself ...
seldom or never troubled with nothing to do and merely desiring that
everybody could be as comfortable as myself and as undesponding, and
then we should have a very tolerable world of it." "I have plenty of
work on hand, and writing...." This, embedded among details of an
incomparable innocence: "We have got Flossy; got and lost Tiger; lost
the hawk, Hero, which, with the geese, was given away, and is doubtless
dead."

And Anne, as naive as a little nun, writes in _her_ sealed paper: "Emily
is upstairs ironing. I am sitting in the dining-room in the
rocking-chair before the fire with my feet on the fender. Papa is in the
parlour. Tabby and Martha are, I think, in the kitchen. Keeper and
Flossy are, I do not know where. Little Dick is hopping in his cage."
And then, "Emily ... is writing some poetry.... I wonder what it is
about?"

That is the only clue to the secret that is given. These childlike
diaries are full of the "Gondal Chronicles",[A] an interminable fantasy
in which for years Emily collaborated with Anne. They flourished the
"Gondal Chronicles" in each other's faces, with positive bravado, trying
to see which could keep it up the longer. Under it all there was a
mystery; for, as Charlotte said of their old play, "Best plays were
secret plays," and the sisters kept their best hidden. And then suddenly
the "Gondal Chronicles" were dropped, the mystery broke down. All three
of them had been writing poems; they had been writing poems for years.
Some of Emily's dated from her first exile at Roe Head. Most of Anne's
sad songs were sung in her house of bondage. From Charlotte, in her
Brussels period, not a line.

[Footnote A: See _supra_, pp. 193 to 209.]

But at Haworth, in the years that followed her return and found her
free, she wrote nearly all her maturer poems (none of them were
excessively mature): she wrote _The Profes