Charlotte’s bitter indictment of Jane’s work, though wholly untrue, can be made allowance for, seeing that her eyes viewed such a different section of the world of feeling. She says of _Pride and Prejudice_: “An accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a commonplace face; a carefully fenced, highly cultured garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers, but no glance of a bright vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck.” And at another time, with much truth: “The passions are perfectly unknown to her; she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy sisterhood. What sees keenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly, it suits her to study; but what throbs fast and full, though hidden, what the blood rushes through, what is the unseen seat of life, and the sentient target of death, this Miss Austen ignores.” Charlotte Brontë’s own strongest point is her _story_, and as the teller of an interesting story, absorbing in its wild and strenuous action, she ranks very high, but character-drawing is not her forte. She herself fails in the point of which she accuses Jane, she could photograph those persons she knew intimately,—herself for instance, or her father’s curates,—but directly she went beyond, she failed; what could be weaker than the society people in _Jane Eyre_,—the ringletted Blanche and the wooden young men? A great many of her minor characters are mere dummies who do not remain in the mind at all. But one of her strong points is one entirely ignored by Jane, and that is the impression of scenery and the aspects of weather. Which of us has not felt a chill of desolation as he stood in fancy on the wet gravel-path leading up to Lowood? or not been sensible of the exhilaration of that sharp, clear, frosty night when Jane first encountered Mr. Rochester in the lane? In a few words, very few, Charlotte Brontë has a marvellous capability for making one feel the surroundings of her characters, and this is no mean gift. Adherents she will always have, and to them it may be granted that her whole theme was one totally ignored by Jane, whose men and women are swept by no mighty whirlwinds of their own generating. In fact it has been alleged against Jane that she had neither passion nor pathos, and perhaps, if we except one or two touches of the latter quality in dealing with forlorn little Fanny in _Mansfield Park_, this is true. The only simile that occurs as suitable to use in the comparison between Charlotte and Jane is that the soul of the one was like the turbulent rush of her own brown Yorkshire streams over the wild moorlands—streams which pour in cataracts and shatter themselves on great grey stones in a tumultuous frenzy, while that of the other resembled the calm limpid waters of her own Hampshire river, the Itchen, wending its way placidly between luscious green meadows. “A deeper sky, where stooping you may see The little minnows darting restlessly.”