,' a
singular interest!
But here I must refer to the letters which Maria Branwell wrote to her
lover during the brief courtship. Mrs. Gaskell, it will be remembered,
makes but one extract from this correspondence, which was handed to her
by Mr. Bronte as part of the material for her memoir. Long years before,
the little packet had been taken from Mr. Bronte's desk, for we find
Charlotte writing to a friend on February 16th, 1850:--
'A few days since, a little incident happened which curiously touched
me. Papa put into my hands a little packet of letters and papers,
telling me that they were mamma's, and that I might read them. I did
read them, in a frame of mind I cannot describe. The papers were
yellow with time, all having been written before I was born. It was
strange now to peruse, for the first time, the records of a mind
whence my own sprang; and most strange, and at once sad and sweet, to
find that mind of a truly fine, pure, and elevated order. They were
written to papa before they were married. There is a rectitude, a
refinement, a constancy, a modesty, a sense, a gentleness about them
indescribable. I wish she had lived, and that I had known her.'
Yet another forty years or so and the little packet is in my possession.
Handling, with a full sense of their sacredness, these letters, written
more than eighty years ago by a good woman to her lover, one is tempted
to hope that there is no breach of the privacy which should, even in our
day, guide certain sides of life, in publishing the correspondence in its
completeness.
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