make fun of his poems, but they were no worse, or very little worse,
than his son Branwell's, so that he may be pardoned if he thought
himself more important than his children. Many fathers of the Victorian
era did.

And he _was_ important as a temporary vehicle of the wandering creative
impulse. It struggled and strove in him and passed from him, choked in
yards and yards of white cravat, to struggle and strive again in
Branwell and in Anne. As a rule the genius of the race is hostile to the
creative impulse, and the creative impulse is lucky if it can pierce
through to one member of a family. In the Brontës it emerges at five
different levels, rising from abortive struggle to supreme
achievement--from Mr. Brontë to his son Branwell, from Branwell to Anne,
from Anne to Charlotte, and from Charlotte to Emily. And Maria, who
died, was an infant prodigy.

And Mr. Brontë is important because he was the tool used by their
destiny to keep Charlotte and Emily in Haworth.

The tragedy we are too apt to call their destiny began with their
babyhood, when the mother and six children were brought to Haworth
Parsonage and the prospect of the tombstones. They had not been there
eighteen months before the mother sickened and died horribly of cancer.

She had to be isolated as far as possible. The Parsonage house was not
large, and it was built with an extreme and straight simplicity; two
front rooms, not large, right and left of the narrow stone-flagged
passage, a bedroom above each, and between, squeezed into the small
spare space above the passage, a third room, no bigger than a closet and
without a fireplace. This third room is important in the story of the