Ellen Nussey Remembers

ant bushes which Emily and Anne treasured as their own bit of fruit garden, is now a perfect Arcadia of floral culture and beauty. At first the alteration, despite its improvement, strikes one with heart-ache and regret: for it is quite impossible, even in imagination, to people those rooms with their former inhabitants. But after-thought shows one the folly of such regret,; for what the Brontes cared for and lived in most were the surroundings of nature; the free expanse of hill and mountain, the purple heather, the dells and glens, and brooks and the broad sky-view, the whistling winds, the snowy expanse, the starry heavens, and the charm of that solitude and seclusion that sees things from a distance without the disturbing atmosphere that lesser minds are apt to create. For it is not the seclusion of a solitary person, such as Charlotte endured in after days, which in time becomes awfully oppressive and injurious. It was solitude and seclusion enjoyed with intelligent companionship, and intense family affection.