Morning journal and courier., 1891-04-04

| side in all manner of angles; as though | they had set out to run away from the | place, and, too feeble to escape, had stuck | fast where they now stand. High above | this modern Haworth, Browmore stretch | es away in interminsble swells of savage, | treeless hills. These circle around to the | south and west, and your eye follows them
 until it catches a steely-gray line of what l at first seems ragged, jagged cubes of rock, cutting In diagonal transverse from the
 bottom to nearly the top of the bare es-
 carpment of another bolder hillside, ter minating in the loftier, drearier Haworth moor This half-defned, ragged line of gray is the ancient village of Haworth. Slipping and sliding along the sinuous, clayey path, you reach the lower end of the long, climbing, winding, village street. Everything is of stone-the houses, the gutters, the rain-troughs, the gargoyle- spouts, and the cobbled way, like an open stoDe sewer cut along the hillside to carry off the seepy oozings of the moor -mosses above. There is but the single street; Main street it is called. Dank, dark clos ses sometimes extend for house-length to the right and left. The yard-wide pave | ments are series of stone stairs and plat forms. Beneath the latter are shadowy shops and living rooms. All stand open; but few inhabitants are to be seen. Those of whom glimpses can be caught are little children, still too young to be ground in the mills, and bowed old crones of women already ground by the mills into voiceless- ness and shapelessDess. Up, up, up, for & mile you plod, and at last reach tiny open space. The houses are set around it closely. Quaint shops and ancient inns crowd it at all sorts of curious angles
 This is the head of the village, topograph- ically, in habitations and in aristocracy
 Not for its attractiveness. but because it
 seems an outlet to somewhere, you pass into a little court behind the Black Bull Inn. It is maze of angles and wynds
 Suddenly another tiny open space con
 fronts you. Here are an old, oblong, two storied stone house, with a few wards of
 grass plot at its side: a little stone church,
 attached to, rather than blended with. a
 grim Norman tower; a graveyard clut-
 tered wish crumbling stones; the whole
 covering barely an acre of ground. These
 were Haworth parsonage, church and
 church yard; the earthly, and final, home
 of the Brontes; and their living eyes ever
 rested on Haworth moor which rises i'm
 mediately above the church-yard like a
 wall of rounded stone.
 Here, within the village nest of the
 moorside eeIie, one may fittingly pause
 and recall the history of the Brontes as
 family. The father, the Rev. Patrick Bronte, was a son of a county Down, Ire | land, farmer, whose real name was Prun- | ty. He was born Patrickmas day, l717, his name being changed to Bronte at the suggestion of his benefactor, the Rev. Mir. | Tighe, rector of Drumgooland parish, in Down. Fine in physique, handsome and | ambitious, he forswore peasant-ife, and, | much after the manner of the ''Poor | Scholar" in Carleton's pathetic tale, gained | enough learning at sixteen to teach a small | private school; soon became a tutor; en- | tered St. Johns college, Cambridge, in | 1902; obtained his B. 4. degree four years | later; was ordained to a curacy; and We | find him, on his marriage, in 1872, to Ma ria Branwell, II sweet and gentle Cornish | maiden of Panzance, the incumbent of the | church living at Hartshead, a little village | near Huddersfeld, about twenty miles 1 sacross the rioers, to the southeast of Hs- l worth They were five years at Hsrts- | head Then Mir. Bronte was transferred | to Thornton, another Yorkshire West Ri
 ding moorland hamlet, "owre the staires, :" 1 that is, over the stairs, or hills four miles
 south of Haworth; the gray old octagonal | chapel-tower at Thornton being visible | from the heights of Browmoor. just over
 there across the valley. MT. Bronte was given the living of Haworth in 1920, and
 with his family took possesson of the old ! parsonage just as you see it to day. He | remained until his death in 1861, period | of forty-one years, the incumbent of St.
 Michael and All Angels, this now world l famed church, which with the parsonage, | grave-y yard and these closely-huddled | houses of stone make mp grim old viii
 lage picture.
 It will be your fortune to be driven | from this parsonage door, just as was Miss | I Nick, sa-g
 in the past; as was the Rev. pr. Theodore
 F. Clarke, of Brooklyn, only last summer;
 and as 1 was yesterday But you may see
 the old graves the Brontes saw: wander
 upon the moors they knew; study the an
 cient tower that escaped the vandals'
 hands; and stand beside the memorial tab
 lets to be one family that made all Ha-
 worth shrine. Then, if you will be eau
 tious and will assure the simple-hearted
 old creature that you will not betray her
 condolences to the present precious incum
 bent of St Michaers, with old ''Susey'
 Ramsden-half, blind and deaf, quite four
 score years of age, but with her love for
 the Bronte family flaming deeper and
 brighter as the end apprOaches-yOu may
 go over all the sad sweet story: Of the
 pious vet stern old curate's Haworth min I istrations; the loss of the gentle, patient
 mother; the death of the older sisters; the curse of the wayward brothers life ana
 terrible death; the grim, unshaken senst of duty shown in the surviving sister
 holding the sunless home together; anC
 then all the long years of iron hearted struggling by the three sisters, "Currer , Ellis and Acton Bell" respectively Char
 lotte, Emily and Anne BrOnte, to reacl the mighty world-heart with their far away, unknown voices and pens; the fina victory and rejoicings; the coming to tn 3 gray old village of the famous and grea
 to do honor to the now wondrous folk O the parsonage; the loss of Charlotte's tw sisters within one year: her own brief an'
 happy welded life and ultimate death; tn n later death of the sturdy old father; th s death, but the other day, in Ireland, of hi
 surviving sister, the last of the Bront family; and, finally, the crOOniDg gossi f about ChGrlotte's husband, Mir Nichollf l once the curate here, and now a white r | haired English farmer;-all in so tender
 way that you will more and more love tn
 very earth these perfect women trod.
 . From ones longing lettering about th n old parsonage where now the spirit of CT
 w and hate repels all who come pilgrim
 ing to the former nest Of genius and iovi from wsnderings over the mOors to whic .- the father and all the talented sisters weI l. so passionatcly devoted; from dTeAmin :, about the ancient church-yaTd with il u dank graves and sOughiDg willows; sn r from hushed and pensive lingering withi is the church by the very spot where all the' IT loving and loyal, sad and tempestuou
 hearts are resting in the eternal silence
 it is delight, if still melancholy plea ,, ure, to turn to an humble home not e stone's throw from parsonage, church au ,- ! graves, where younger cousin of Cha
 lotte's faithful nurse, Martha Brown, hal IT with dogged fidelity 10 a generous sent l. ment gathered together many of the sea n