Her great heart was always bleeding. Here at Dewsbury, in the years we
are contemplating, the hemorrhage was of the most doleful kind, for it
was concealed, suppressed, it was an inward flow. When once she became
an author the pain of her soul was relieved. She said, in 1850, looking
back on the publication of the hapless first volume of poems, "The mere
effort to succeed gave a wonderful zest to existence." Then, a little
later, when no one had paid the slightest attention to the slender trio
of maiden voices, "Something like the chill of despair began to invade
their hearts." With a less powerful inspiration, they must have ceased
to make the effort; they must have succumbed in a melancholy oblivion.
But they were saved by the instinct of a mission. It was not their
private grief which primarily stirred them. What urged them on was the
dim consciousness that they gave voice to a dumb sense of the suffering
of all the world. They had to go on working; they had to pursue their
course, though it might seem sinister or fatal; their business was to
move mankind, not to indulge or please it. They "must be honest; they
must not varnish, soften, or conceal."

What Charlotte Brontë was learning to do in her grim and, let us admit
it, her unlovely probation on Dewsbury Moor, was to introduce a fresh
aspect of the relations of literature to life. Every great writer has a
new note; hers was--defiance. All the aspects in which life presented
itself to her were distressing, not so much in themselves as in herself.
She rebelled against the outrages of poverty, and she drank to its dregs
the cup of straitened circumstances. She was proud, as proud as Lucifer,
and she was forced into positions which suppleness and cheerfulness
might have made tolerable, if not agreeable. She wrung from these
positions their last drop of bitterness. A very remarkable instance of
this may be found in her relation to the Sidgwick family, who, by