that the strong passions which led him astray betokened a strong character and not a powerless will.
It was still to Branwell that they looked for the fame of the family. Their poems, their stories, were to these girls but a legitimate means of amusement and relief. The serious business of their life was to teach, to cook, to clean; to earn or save the mere expense of their existence. No dream of literary fame gave a purpose to the quiet days of Emily Brontë. Charlotte and Branwell, more impulsive, more ambitious, had sent their work to Southey, to Coleridge, to Wordsworth, in vain, pathetic hope of encouragement, or recognition. Not so the sterner Emily, to whom expression was at once a necessity and a regret. Emily's brain, Emily's locked desk, these and nothing else knew the degree of her passion, her genius, her power. And yet acknowledged power would have been sweet to that dominant spirit.
Meanwhile the immediate difficulty was to earn a living. Even those patient and courageous girls could not accept the thought of a whole lifetime spent in dreary governessing by Charlotte and Anne, in solitary drudgery by homekeeping Emily. One way out of this hateful vista seemed not impossible of attainment. For years it was the wildest hope, the cherished dream of the author of 'Wuthering Heights' and the author of 'Villette.' And what was this dear and daring ambition?—to keep a ladies' school at Haworth.
Far enough off, difficult to reach, it looked to them, this paltry common-place ideal of theirs. For the house with its four bedrooms would have to be enlarged; for the girls' education, with its Anglo-French and stumbling music, would have to be adorned by the requisite accomplishments. This would take time; time and money; two luxuries most hard to get for the Vicar of Haworth's
