'"Yes! though his tottering limbs seem old, His heart and blood are not yet cold. Ah, Grundy! shun his evil ways, His restless nights, his troubled days; But never slight his mind, which flies, Instinct with noble sympathies, Afar from spleen and treachery, To thought, to kindness, and to thee. '"P. B. BRONTË."'[37] [37] 'Pictures of the Past,' pp. 78-79. Branwell's extreme sensibility caused him, indeed, to exaggerate both the lights and the shadows of his existence. He was gleeful, as I found, full of fun, jest, and anecdote, in social circles, or where literature and art were the theme; and then, almost involuntarily, would rise to his feet, and, with a beaming countenance, treat the subject with a vivid flow of imagination, displaying the rich stores of his information with wondrous and enthralling eloquence. But, under disappointment or misfortune, he fell a prey to gloomy thoughts, and reached a state often near akin to despair. It was at such moments that he usually took up his pen to express, in poetry, the fulness of his feelings and the depth of his sorrow; and it is to this fact that the pathetic sadness of most of his writings is due. I have had occasion already to speak of the melancholy tone which characterized also the minds of his sisters. The worth of Branwell's poetic genius about this time,--the year of 1842,--has been unfairly commented upon. Miss Robinson, questioning the judgment of the Brontë sisters, undertakes to doubt if Branwell's mental gifts were any better than his moral qualities, and says: 'It is doubtful, judging from Branwell's letters and his verses, whether anything much better than his father's "Cottage in the Wood" would have resulted from his following the advice of James Montgomery. Fluent ease, often on the verge of twaddle, with here and there a bright felicitous touch, with here and there a smack of the conventional hymn-book and pulpit twang--such weak and characterless effusions are all that is left of the passion-ridden pseudo-genius of Haworth.'[38] [38] 'Emily Brontë,' p. 97. Miss Robinson's ignorance of Branwell's more matured poems and writings has caused her, in company with others, to fall into very grave errors regarding him; and she,--with extreme bitterness, it must be said,--has embellished her biography of Emily with elaborate censures of his misdeeds, and with accounts of his imputed glaring inferiority to his sisters in intellectual power. It is pitiable, indeed, that Miss Robinson,--and not she alone,--in the want of Branwell's true life and remains, with nothing to set against the primary errors of Mrs. Gaskell,--should have joined the hue and cry against him, and have essayed, almost as of set purpose, to write down the gifted brother of the author whose life she was giving to the world.