The life of Charlotte Brontë, Volume 2 |
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admiration Agnes Grey Ambleside Anne ANNE BRONTË believe Casterton character Charlotte Brontë cheer Cloth cold critics Currer Bell dear Sir Emily EMILY BRONTË Emily's excitement expressed father fear feel felt Filey G. H. LEWES George Sand give glad Gothic Archi Half calf Haworth headache hear heard heart hope illness impression interest Jane Eyre Keighley kind knew lady letter looked Messrs mind Miss Brontë Miss Martineau Miss Wooler morning morocco nature never Nicholls night once pain Papa Parsonage pleasant pleasure pretty publishers quiet quietly received seems seen sent Shirley sincerely sisters Smith speak spirits stay strength strong suffered Sydney Dobell Tabby tale tell Thackeray Thackeray's thankful things thought tion told trust truth Villette visit to London weather week wish woman words write wrote Wuthering Heights
Popular passages
Page 42 - When authors write best, or, at least, when they write most fluently, an influence seems to waken in them, which becomes their master — which will have its own way — putting out of view all behests but its own, dictating certain words, and insisting on their being used, whether vehement or measured in their nature; new-moulding characters, giving unthought-of turns to incidents, rejecting carefully elaborated old ideas, and suddenly creating and adopting new ones.
Page 43 - Pride and Prejudice till I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book. And what did I find ? An accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a commonplace face; a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright, vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses.
Page 264 - FORASMUCH as it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy to take unto himself the soul of our dear brother here departed, we therefore commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust ; in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life...
Page 19 - He read it trembling. It declined, indeed, to publish that tale, for business reasons, but it discussed its merits and demerits so courteously, so considerately, in a spirit so rational, with a discrimination so enlightened, that this very refusal cheered the author better than a vulgarly-expressed acceptance would have done. It was added, that a work in three volumes would meet with careful attention.
Page 45 - sentiment,' in my sense of the term — sentiment jealously hidden, but genuine, which extracts the venom from that formidable Thackeray, and converts what might be corrosive poison into purifying elixir. " If Thackeray did not cherish in his large heart deep feeling for his kind, he would delight to exterminate ; as it is, I believe, he wishes only to reform. Miss Austen being, as you say, without ' sentiment,' without poetry, maybe is sensible, real (more real than true), but she cannot be great.
Page 31 - Athenians of old, and like them " spending their time in nothing else, but either to tell or to hear some new thing," were astonished and delighted to find that a fresh sensation, a new pleasure, was in reserve for them in the...
Page 216 - You say that she may be thought morbid and weak, unless the history of her life be more fully given. I consider that she is both morbid and weak at times ; her character sets up no pretensions to unmixed strength, and anybody living her life would necessarily become morbid.
Page 32 - His wit is bright, his humour attractive, but both bear the same relation to his serious genius that the mere lambent sheet-lightning playing under the edge of the summer cloud does to the electric death-spark hid in its womb.
Page 97 - As an instance how the characters have been managed take that of Mr. Helstone. If this character had an original it was in the person of a clergyman who died some years since at the advanced age of eighty. I never saw him except once — at the consecration of a church — when I was a child of ten years old. I was then struck with his appearance and stern, martial air. At a subsequent period I heard him talked about in the neighbourhood where he had resided : some mentioned him with enthusiasm,...
Page 108 - ... such a prospect of solitude. In her deep mourning dress (neat as a quaker's), with her beautiful hair, smooth and brown, her fine eyes blazing with meaning, and her sensible face indicating a habit of self-control, if not of silence, she seemed a perfect household image - irresistibly recalling Wordsworth's description of that domestic treasure.