In his first contention Mr. Clement Shorter is undeniably right: it _is_ quite true that '_the publication of these Letters places Charlotte Brontë on a higher pedestal than ever_.' But why is this true? _Because these are love-letters of a very rare and wonderful character_; because the passionate tragical emotion that throbs through them is a love that, recognised as hopeless, as unrequited, makes only one claim; that, _precisely because it makes no other_, it has a right to be accepted and to live. Now this sort of love is a _very rare and wonderful emotion, that only a noble being can feel; and that although it is hopeless, tragical, is nevertheless a splendid fact, that renders it absurd to deny that sublime unselfishness is a capacity of human nature_. And, again, these letters place Charlotte Brontë 'on a higher pedestal than ever,' because in them her vocation and gift of expressing her own emotions in a way that makes them 'vibrate' in us like living feelings is here carried to its height. So that these personal letters, more even than the pictured emotions of Lucy Snowe, stand out as a record of romantic love that (in so far as I know) has never before been rivalled. It is true we have the romantic love-letters of Abelard and Héloïse, and the letters in the _New Héloïse_ of Saint-Preux to Julie, and of Julie to Saint-Preux, after their separation, as beautiful examples of love surviving hope of happiness; and Sainte-Beuve has quoted, as examples of the tragical disinterested passion of a love that claims no return, but only the right to exist, the letters of some eighteenth-century women: Mademoiselle de l'Espinasse, Madame de la Popelinière, and Mademoiselle d'Aissé. But in none of these historic love-letters (so, at least, it seems to me) does one feel, with the same truth and strength as in these recently published letters of Charlotte Brontë to M. Heger, the 'vibration' of this tragical, hopeless, romantic love, that asks for nothing but acceptance, that does not 'seek its own'--the love that only asks to give, compared with which all other sorts of love, that _do_ seek their own and claim return, are as sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal. But now, if we were to accept the view of these letters, that they do not express love at all, but merely the writer's '_desire of comradeship with a great man_': and that '_after she had become famous "she found that literary comradeship she desired, in half a dozen male correspondents, to whom she addressed letters in every way as interesting as those written by her to M. Heger_"'; and that '_there is nothing in these letters that any enthusiastic woman might not write to a man double her age, who was a married man with a family, and who had been her teacher_'--if we could accept all these views, could we _then_ hold the opinion that 'the publication of these letters places Charlotte on a higher pedestal than ever'?