Miss Nussey had opportunities for observing the Bronte girls that no other person had. She became Charlotte's friend at school, when both were homesick and needed friends. She continued to be her fast friend through life. Gentle Anne Bronte died in her arms, and she was Charlotte's true consoler when the heroic Emily passed swiftly away. She early discovered the ring of genius in Charlotte's letters, and preserved every scrap of them, and it is chiefly through those letters that the Brontes are known in England. She was Charlotte's confidante in all private transactions and love matters, and she might have been a nearer friend still had Charlotte not refused an offer of marriage from her brother--an incident in the novelist's life here for the first time made public. Miss Nussey was not only Charlotte's devoted friend, but she was a constant visitor at Haworth, and a keen observer. She had a great power of discernment in literary matters, and a very considerable literary gift herself. She had not to wait till "Jane Eyre" and "Wuthering Heights" were published to learn that Charlotte and Emily Bronte were endowed with genius. We owe it to her penetrating sagacity that we know so much of the vicar's daughters. She watched their growth of intellect and everything that ministered to it, and she believes firmly that the girls caught their inspiration from their father, and that Emily got not only her inspiration but most of her facts from her father's narratives.[4] [4] Swinburne, in his "Note on Charlotte Bronte," has alone had the poetic insight and artistic instinct to discern this fact. He is right when he says, "Charlotte evidently never worked so well as when painting more or less directly from nature.... In most cases, probably, the designs begun by means of the camera were transferred for completion to the canvas." Swinburne, however, falls short in discernment, when, in contrasting Charlotte with her sister, he says: "Emily Bronte, like William Blake, would probably have said, or at least presumably have felt, that such study after the model was to her impossible--an attempt but too certain to diminish her imaginative insight and disable her creative hand." Surely the highest imaginative insight and deftest creative hand work from the model, nature, but the result is not a mere portrait of the model.