e opinion of Charlotte Bronte that I hold; and indeed I have
always thought that, allowing for a difference of nationality, he was
very much the kind of man whom she depicted in Villette as Paul
Emmanuel.

Personality is, after all, the ultimate foundation of art, and I think
that what I value most of all in Charlotte Bronte's books is the
revelation of herself that they afford. The shy, frail, indomitable,
ardent creature, inured to poverty and hardness, without illusions,
without material temptations, but all aglow with the sacred fire--such
is the character that here emerges. Charlotte Bronte as a writer seems
to me like a burning-glass which concentrates on one intense point the
fiercest fire of the soul. I would humbly believe that there is much of
this spirit in the world, but that it seldom co-exists with the
artistic power, the intellectual force, that enables it to express
itself.

And now I will tell you what has made me take up Jane Eyre again at
this time. I was bicycling a day or two ago in a secluded valley under
the purple heights of Ingleboro'. I passed a little village, with a big
building standing by a stream below the road, called Lowood. It came
into my head as a pleasant thought that some place like this might have
been the scene of the schooldays of Jane Eyre; but I thought no more of
it, till a little while after I saw a tablet in the wall of a house by
the wayside. I dismounted, and behold! it was the very place, the very
building where Charlotte Bronte spent her schooldays. It was a low,
humble building, now divided into cottages. But you can still see the
windows of the dormitory, the little kitchen garden, the brawling
stream, the path across the meadows, and, beyond all, the long line of
the moor. In a house just opposite was a portrait of Mr. Brocklehurst
himself (his real name was Carus-Wilson), so sternly, and I expect
unjustly, gibbetted in the book. That was a very sacred hour for me. I
thought of Miss Temple and Helen Burns; I thought of the cold, the
privation, the rigour of that comfortless place. But I felt that it was
good to be there. I drew nearer in that hour to the unquenched spirit
that battled so gloriously with life and with its worst terrors and
sorrows, and that wrote so firmly and truly its pure hopes and immortal
dreams. . . .--Ever yours,

T. B.

ASHFIELD,
SETTLE,
Aug. 27, 1904.

DEAR HERBERT,--You ask me to send you out some novels, and you have put