The winter of 1848 was a dark one at Haworth. Her only brother, and the sister she so intensely loved, and whose genius she ever delighted to exalt above her own, died within a few weeks of each other. Miss Brontë was prostrate with fever; and Anne, always delicate, grew rapidly worse. The two went together to Scarborough the following spring. There the younger sister died, and the elder was left alone with her aged father in that dreary deserted home among the graves. In June, 1850, she visited London, saw her old hero the Duke of Wellington, at the Chapel Royal, had an interview with Lewes, and dined with Thackeray. The same summer she went on to Edinburgh to join the friends with whom she had been staying in town. In a letter to a correspondent, she says: “Do not think that I blaspheme, when I tell you that your great London, as compared to Dunedin, ‘mine own romantic town,’ is as prose compared to poetry; or as a great rumbling, rambling, heavy epic compared to a lyric, brief, bright, clear, and vital as a flash of lightning. You have nothing like Scott’s monument; or, if you had that, and all the glories of architecture assembled together, you have nothing like Arthur’s seat, and above all, you have not the Scottish national character; and it is that grand character after all which gives the land its true charm, its true greatness.” The three following years pass over. One of the deepest interests of her life centres round the 29th of June, 1854. On that day many old and humble friends saw her come out of Haworth church, leaning on the arm of “one of the best gentlemen in the county,” and looking “like a snowdrop.” We almost smile as we think of the merciless derider of weak and insipid suitors finding a lord and a master—of the hand which drew the three solemn ecclesiastics, Malone, Donne, and Sweeting, locked at the altar in that of her father’s curate, and learning from experience,— “That marriage, rightly understood, Gives to the tender and the good A paradise below.” Mr. Nicholls loved Miss Brontë as his own soul, and she loved him, and every day her love grew stronger. In the last letter she ever wrote, we find the following sentence: “No kinder, better husband than mine, it seems to me, there can be in the world.” Home joys are only dependent, in a small degree, on external circumstances. Nine months followed of calm happiness—months of respite and rest. During the next winter she was confined to a sick bed, from which she never rose. The doctor assured her that all would soon be right. Martha tenderly waited on her mistress, and from time to time had tried to cheer her with the thoughts of the baby that was coming. But she died on the 31st March, 1855, in the thirty-ninth year of her age, after a long and weary illness, bravely as she had lived, and left her widowed husband and childless father sitting desolate and alone in the old grey parsonage.