looked at my love; it shivered in my heart like a suffering child in a
cold cradle!"

And this woman died before her child was born.

* * * * *

Then there is Mrs. Oliphant again. Though she was not one of those who
said Charlotte Brontë was not fond of children, though she would have
died rather than have joined Lewes in his unspeakable cry against her,
Mrs. Oliphant made certain statements in no better taste than his. She
suggests that Charlotte, fond or not fond of children, was too fond of
matrimonial dreams. Her picture (the married woman's picture) is of an
undesired and undesirable little spinster pining visibly and shamelessly
in a parsonage. She would have us believe that from morning till night,
from night till morning, Charlotte Brontë in the Parsonage thought of
nothing but of getting married, that her dreams pursued, ruthlessly, the
casual visitor. The hopelessness of the dream, the undesirability of
Charlotte, is what makes her so irresistible to her sister novelist.

There was "one subject", she says, "which Charlotte Brontë had at her
command, having experienced in her own person, and seen her nearest
friends under the experience, of that solitude and longing of women of
which she has made so remarkable an exposition. The long silence of life
without an adventure or a change, the forlorn gaze out of windows which
never show anyone coming who can rouse the slightest interest in the
mind, the endless years and days which pass and pass, carrying away the
bloom, extinguishing the lights of youth, bringing a dreary middle age
before which the very soul shrinks, while yet the sufferer feels how
strong is the current of life in her own veins, and how capable she is