unhappy school-life here, which she has so graphically portrayed. For
our purpose no guide was available, or needful, for the topography and
local coloring of "Villette" and "The Professor" are as vivid and
unmistakable as in the best work of Dickens himself. Proceeding from St.
Gudule, by the little street at the back of the cathedral, to the Rue
Royale, and a short distance along that grand thoroughfare, we reached
the park and a locality familiar to Miss Bronté's readers. Seated in
this lovely pleasure-ground, the gift of the empress Maria Theresa, with
its cool shade all about us, we noted the long avenues and the paths
winding amid stalwart trees and verdant shrubbery, the dark foliage
ineffectually veiling the gleaming statuary and the sheen of bright
fountains, "the stone basin with its clear depth, the thick-planted
trees which framed this tremulous and rippled mirror," the groups of
happy people filling the seats in secluded nooks or loitering in the
cool mazes and listening to the music,--we noted all this, and felt that
Miss Bronté had revealed it to us long ago. It was across this park that
Lucy Snowe was piloted from the bureau of the diligence by the
chivalrous stranger, Dr. John, on the night when she, despoiled,
helpless, and solitary, arrived in Brussels. She found the park deserted
and dark, the paths miry, the water "dripping from its trees." "In the
double gloom of tree and fog she could not see her guide, and could only
follow his tread" in the darkness. We recalled another scene under these
same tail trees, on a night when the iron gateway was "spanned by a
naming arch of massed stars." The park was a "forest with sparks of
purple and ruby and golden fire gemming the foliage," and Lucy, driven
from her couch by mental torture, wandered unrecognized amid the gay
throng at the midnight concert of the Festival of the Martyrs and looked
upon her lover, her friends the Brettons, and the secret junta of her
enemies, Madame Beck, Madame Walravens, and Père Silas.