It is impossible to write of the three Brontës and forget the place they
lived in, the black-grey, naked village, bristling like a rampart on the
clean edge of the moor; the street, dark and steep as a gully, climbing
the hill to the Parsonage at the top; the small oblong house, naked and
grey, hemmed in on two sides by the graveyard, its five windows flush
with the wall, staring at the graveyard where the tombstones, grey and
naked, are set so close that the grass hardly grows between. The church
itself is a burying ground; its walls are tombstones, and its floor
roofs the forgotten and the unforgotten dead.

A low wall and a few feet of barren garden divide the Parsonage from the
graveyard, a few feet between the door of the house and the door in the
wall where its dead were carried through. But a path leads beyond the
graveyard to "a little and a lone green lane", Emily Brontë's lane that
leads to the open moors.

It is the genius of the Brontës that made their place immortal; but it
is the soul of the place that made their genius what it is. You cannot
exaggerate its importance. They drank and were saturated with Haworth.
When they left it they hungered and thirsted for it; they sickened till
the hour of their return. They gave themselves to it with passion, and
their works ring with the shock and interchange of two immortalities.
Haworth is saturated with them. Their souls are henceforth no more to be
disentangled from its soul than their bodies from its earth. All their
poetry, their passion and their joy is there, in this place of their
tragedy, visible, palpable, narrow as the grave and boundless.

In the year eighteen-twenty the Reverend Patrick Brontë and his wife