"I err. She came once, but in anger. Impatient of my importunity she brought with her an avenging dream. By the clock of St. Jean Baptiste, that dream remained scarce fifteen minutes--a brief space, but sufficing to wring my whole frame with unknown anguish; to confer a nameless experience that had the hue, the mien, the terror, the very tone of a visitation from eternity. Between twelve and one that night a cup was forced to my lips, black, strong, strange, drawn from no well, but filled up seething from a bottomless and boundless sea. Suffering, brewed in temporal or calculable measure, and mixed for mortal lips, tastes not as this suffering tasted. Having drank [sic] and woke, I thought all was over: the end come and passed by. Trembling fearfully--as consciousness returned--ready to cry out on some fellow-creature to help me, only that I knew no fellow-creature was near enough to catch the wild summons--Goton in her far distant attic could not hear--I rose on my knees in bed. Some fearful hours went over me; indescribably was I torn, racked and oppressed in mind. Amidst the horrors of that dream I think the worst lay here. Methought the well-loved dead, who had loved ME well in life, met me elsewhere alienated; galled was my inmost spirit with an unutterable sense of despair about the future. Motive there was none why I should try to recover or wish to live; and yet quite unendurable was the pitiless and haughty voice in which Death challenged me to engage his unknown terrors. When I tried to pray I could only utter these words:-- "'From my youth up Thy terrors have I suffered with a troubled mind.'" The deep interest of this experience is that it was endured by one who was not only intellectually endowed beyond most women of her time, but whose sanity, reasonableness, and moral force were conspicuously strong. Charlotte Bronte was not one of those impulsive and imaginative women who are the prey of every fancy. Throughout the whole of her career, she was for ever compelling her frail and sensitive temperament, with indomitable purpose, to perform whatever she had undertaken to do. There never was anyone who lived so sternly by principle and reason, or who so maintained her self-control in the face of sorrow, disaster, unhappiness, and bereavement. She never gave way to feeble or morbid self-accusation, and therefore the fact that she could thus have suffered is a sign that this unnamed terror can coexist with a dauntless courage and an essential self-command. Here again is the cry of a desolate heart! She had been going through her sisters' papers not long after their death, and wrote to her great friend: