Page:A note on Charlotte Brontë (IA note00swinoncharlottebrich).pdf/61

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the note of power and sincerity perceptible in the crude coarse outlines of 'The Professor' may well have been startled and shaken out of all judicial balance and critical reserve at sight of the sudden sunrise which followed so fast on that diffident uncertain dawn. One of the two only women among their contemporaries, who for absolute inspiration of positive genius may without absurdity of anticlimax be named beside Charlotte Brontë and her sister, has told how sudden and how perfect was the conversion wrought by a first reading of the manuscript of 'Indiana' on the grim and truculent amity of her first literary tutor and censor, the Rhadamanthine author of 'Fragoletta'; who certainly, to judge by his own examples of construction, had some