My contention is that it _is_ this romantic Love that reveals itself in Charlotte's letters to M. Heger. And for this reason, I agree with Mr. Clement Shorter that they put her upon a higher pedestal than ever. For to have a heart capable of this great and glorious, albeit often tragical, romantic Love, that 'seeketh not its own,' and compared with which all other sorts of love, that _do_ seek their own, are as sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal is, _independently of deeds or works_, greatly to serve mankind. For it is to stand as a witness, amongst the meannesses of mortal and worldly things, to the existence of Something personal and immortal in the soul and heart of man, helping him '_to gild his dross thereby_.'[4] Something sovereign, that, quite independently of forms of belief, or fashions of opinion, '_rules by every school, till love and longing die_.' Something indestructible, confined to no epoch, ancient, mediæval or modern, but, '_that was, or yet the lights were set, a whisper in the void; that will be sung in planets young when this is clean destroyed_.' In other words, I esteem human nature honoured in Charlotte Brontë, and Charlotte Brontë honoured in these Letters, _because they are love-letters of a rare and wonderful sort amongst the most beautiful, although they are the most sad ever written_. If they were _not_ love-letters, but expressed the enthusiasm of a woman wanting comradeship with a great man, I should esteem them discreditable to any hero-worshipper. Because one should not pester one's hero with letters, nor conceive the conceit of comradeship with an object of worship. And it is not true that Charlotte's letters to Thackeray, George Henry Lewes and other men of letters after she became famous, had the same character as these love-letters written to M. Heger before her name was known; because in her letters to different celebrated writers, Charlotte talked about books or the criticism of books. But to M. Heger she throws open the secret chamber of her heart: she pours out its treasures of passionate feelings (as pure as they were passionate) at the feet of the man she loves; all she asks for from him in return is not to reprove her, nor refuse the offering; not to withdraw himself from her life altogether. To let her hear from him sometimes: not to leave her utterly alone, in the darkness, without any knowledge of what good or evil may befall one so dear to her. Unfortunately we do not possess the first Letters of this correspondence. The four Letters given by Dr. Paul Heger to the British Museum all belong to a period when the Professor, who had answered (one does not know precisely in what way) Charlotte's first epistles, had left off replying to her; and the consistent motive of these four appeals is for some tidings of him, some proof that the 'estrangement from her Master,' to which she says she will never 'voluntarily' consent, has not, in spite of her own unaltered devotion, irrevocably taken place.