Restore to me that little spot,
With grey hills compassed round,
Where knotted grass neglected lies,
And weeds usurp the ground.

For she, too, loved the moors; and through her love for them she wrote
two perfect lines when she called on Memory to

Forever hang thy dreamy spell
Round mountain star and heather-bell.

The critics, the theorists, the tale-mongers, have left Anne quiet in
that grave on the sea-coast, where she lies apart. Her gentle
insignificance served her well.

* * * * *

But no woman who ever wrote was more criticized, more spied upon, more
lied about, than Charlotte. It was as if the singular purity and poverty
of her legend offered irresistible provocation. The blank page called
for the scribbler. The silence that hung about her was dark with
challenge; it was felt to be ambiguous, enigmatic. Reserve suggests a
reservation, something hidden and kept back from the insatiable public
with its "right to know". Mrs. Gaskell with all her indiscretions had
not given it enough. The great classic _Life of Charlotte Brontë_ was,
after all, incomplete. Until something more was known about her,
Charlotte herself was incomplete. It was nothing that Mrs. Gaskell's
work was the finest, tenderest portrait of a woman that it was ever
given to a woman to achieve; nothing that she was not only recklessly
and superbly loyal to Charlotte, but that in her very indiscretions she