-loved dead, who had loved ME well in life, met me elsewhere
alienated; galled was my inmost spirit with an unutterable sense of
despair about the future. Motive there was none why I should try to
recover or wish to live; and yet quite unendurable was the pitiless and
haughty voice in which Death challenged me to engage his unknown
terrors. When I tried to pray I could only utter these words:--

"'From my youth up Thy terrors have I suffered with a troubled mind.'"

The deep interest of this experience is that it was endured by one who
was not only intellectually endowed beyond most women of her time, but
whose sanity, reasonableness, and moral force were conspicuously
strong. Charlotte Bronte was not one of those impulsive and imaginative
women who are the prey of every fancy. Throughout the whole of her
career, she was for ever compelling her frail and sensitive
temperament, with indomitable purpose, to perform whatever she had
undertaken to do. There never was anyone who lived so sternly by
principle and reason, or who so maintained her self-control in the face
of sorrow, disaster, unhappiness, and bereavement. She never gave way
to feeble or morbid self-accusation, and therefore the fact that she
could thus have suffered is a sign that this unnamed terror can coexist
with a dauntless courage and an essential self-command.

Here again is the cry of a desolate heart! She had been going through
her sisters' papers not long after their death, and wrote to her great
friend:

"I am both angry and surprised at myself for not being in better
spirits; for not growing accustomed, or at least resigned, to the
solitude and isolation of my lot. But my late occupation left a result,
for some days and indeed still, very painful. The reading over of
papers, the renewal of remembrances, brought back the pangs of
bereavement and occasioned a depression of spirits well-nigh
intolerable. For one or two nights I hardly knew how to get on till
morning; and when morning came I was still haunted by a sense of
sickening distress. I tell you these things because it is absolutely
necessary to me to have SOME relief. You will forgive me and not
trouble yourself, or imagine that I am one whit worse than I say. It is
quite a mental ailment, and I believe and hope is better now. I think
so, because I can speak about it, which I never can when grief is at
its worst. I thought to find occupation and interest in writing when
alone at home, b