[Sidenote: Charlotte’s studies from the life.] The habit of direct study from life which has given us, among its finest and most precious results, these two contrasted figures of Shirley Keeldar and Lucy Snowe, affords yet another point of contrast or distinction between the manner and motive of work respectively perceptible in the design of either sister. Emily Brontë, like William Blake, would probably have said, or at least would 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; while Charlotte evidently never worked so well as when painting more or less directly from nature. Almost the only apparent exception, as far as we--the run of her readers--know, is the wonderful and incomparable figure of Rochester.... In most cases probably the design begun by means of the camera was transferred for completion to the canvas. The likeness of Mr. Helstone to Mr. Brontë, for example, was thus at once enlarged and subdued, heightened and modified, by the skilful and noble instinct which kept it always within the gracious and natural bounds prescribed and maintained by the fine tact of filial respect. [Sidenote: The gift of the Brontë sisters.] The gift of which I would speak is that of a power to make us feel in every nerve, at every step forward which our imagination is compelled to take under the guidance of another’s, that thus and not otherwise, but in all things altogether even as we are told and shown, it was and it must have been with the human figures set before us in their action and their suffering; that thus and not otherwise they absolutely must and would have felt and thought and spoken under the proposed conditions. It is something for a writer to have achieved if he has made it worth our fancy’s while to consider by the light of imaginative reason whether the creatures of his own fancy would in actual fact and life have done as he has made them do or not; it is something, and by comparison it is much. But no definite terms of comparison will suffice to express how much more than this it is to have done what the youngest of capable readers must feel on first opening ‘Jane Eyre’ that the writer of its very first pages has shown herself competent to do.... Even in the best and greatest works of our best and greatest we do not find this one great good quality so innate, so immanent as in hers. At most we find the combination of event with character, the coincidence of action with disposition, the coherence of consequences with emotions, to be rationally credible and acceptable to the natural sense of a reasonable faith. We rarely or never feel that, given the characters, the incidents become inevitable; that such passion must needs bring forth none other than such action, such emotions cannot choose but find their only issue in such events. And certainly we do not feel, what it seems to me the highest triumph of