I see these sisters at night, released from toil, when their father had retired to rest, denied the cheerful candle-light, pacing up and down, in utter darkness, the dreary little sitting-room, talking of the vacant past and present, and trying vainly to pierce the impenetrable future for one glimmering ray of hope; and as years passed on, and vision after vision faded away--alas! with those who wove them--I see Charlotte, the last survivor of that little group, pacing _alone_ that desolate sitting-room; while the winds that swept over the bleak moor, and through the church-yard, and howled about the windows, seemed to the excited imagination of the lonely, feeble watcher, like the voices of her sisters shrieking to be again enfolded in her warm, sisterly embrace. Alone--_all_ alone!--no shoulder to weep upon--no loving sister’s hand to creep about her waist--the voices of her soul crying eternally, unceasingly, vainly, Give, give--and he who gave her life, sleeping, eating, drinking, as stoically as if ten thousand deaths were not compressed, to that feeble girl, into each agonized moment. One smiles now, when the praise of “Jane Eyre” is on every tongue, at the weary way the author’s thumbed manuscript traveled from publisher to publisher, seeking a resting-place, and finding none; and when at length it did appear in book form--the caution of the sapient book-dissecting “London Athenæum” containing only “very qualified admissions of the power of the author”--also of “The Literary Gazette,” which “considered it unsafe to pronounce upon an unknown author;” also at “The Daily News,” which “did not review novels”--but found time soon afterward to notice others. Mistaken gentlemen! you were yet, like some others of your class, to take off your publishing and editorial hats to the little woman who was destined to a world-wide fame, but--and if ye have manly hearts they must have ached ere now to think of it--not until the bitter cup of privation and sorrow had been so nearly drained to the dregs by those quivering lips, that the laurel wreath, so bravely, hardly won, was twined with the cypress vine. Literary fame! alas--what is it to a _loving_ woman’s heart, save that it lifts her out of the miry pit of poverty and toil? To have one’s glowing thoughts handled, twisted, and distorted by coarse fingers; to shed scalding tears over the gravest charge which can be untruthfully brought against a woman’s pen; to bear it, writhing in silence, and have that silence misconstrued, or speak in your own defense, and be called unwomanly; to be a target for slander, envy, and misrepresentation, by those of both sexes who can not look upon a shining garment without a wish to defile it--all this, a man’s shoulders may be broad enough to bear, but she must be a strong _woman_ who does not stagger under it.