ite--for he
never even saw the anxieties that were nearest to him--but a nightmare
dream of chaos and whirling forces all about him, a dread of slipping
off his own very fairly comfortable perch into oceans of confusion and
dismay.

XIII

CHARLOTTE BRONTE

I doubt if the records of intimate biography contain a finer
object-lesson against fear and all its obsessions than the life of
Charlotte Bronte. She was of a temperament which in many ways was more
open to the assaults of fear than any which could well be devised. She
was frail and delicate, liable to acute nervous depression, intensely
shy and sensitive, and susceptible as well; that is to say that her
shyness did not isolate her from her kind; she wanted to be loved,
respected, even admired. When she did love, she loved with fire and
passion and desperate loyalty.

Her life was from beginning to end full of sharp and tragic
experiences. She was born and brought up in a bleak moorland village,
climbing steeply and grimly to the edge of heathery uplands. The bare
parsonage, with its little dark rooms, looks out on a churchyard paved
with graves. Her father was a kindly man, but essentially moody and
solitary. He took all his meals alone, walked alone, sate alone. Her
mother died of cancer, when she was but a child. Then she was sent to
an ill-managed austere school, and here when she was nine years old her
two elder sisters died. She took service two or three times as a
governess, and endured agonies of misunderstanding, suspicious of her
employers, afraid of her pupils, longing for home with an intense
yearning. Then she went out to a school at Brussels, where under the
teaching of M. Heger, a gifted professor, her mind and heart awoke, and
she formed for him a strange affection, half an intellectual devotion,
half an unconscious passion, which deprived her of her peace of mind.
Her sad and wistful letters to him, lately published, were disregarded
by him, partly because his wife was undoubtedly jealous of the
relation, partly because he was disconcerted by the emotion he had
aroused. Her brother, a brilliant, wayward, and in some ways attractive
boy, got into disgrace, and drifted home, where he tried to console
himself with drink and opium. After three years of this horrible life,
he died, and within twelve months her two surviving sisters, Emily and
Anne, developed consumption and died. As Robert Browning says, there
indeed was "trouble enough for o