The Brontes

72 THE BRONTES
same abilities might be a grave drawback to him
in seeking or keeping to the dull round of ordinary,
unintellectual employment.
The experiment of sending Emily with Char-
lotte when the latter returned to Roe Head as a
teacher was, as Emily herself might have said,
" no go." Charlotte gave an account of it in that
well-known passage in the memoir of her sisters,
telling how Emily became so ill from homesick-
ness that she had to be sent back to Haworth after
three months of school. Charlotte, who stayed
on with Anne, who took Emily's place, was also
miserably homesick, for Angria, as we now know.
Emily's homesickness may have been for Gondal-
land, or its predecessor ; we have only Charlotte's
word for it that it was the moors for which she
pined. Emily was far more secretive even than
Charlotte about her inmost feelings and Charlotte
never mentioned Angria when she wrote to Ellen
saying how wretched she was. Charlotte gave
Ellen to suppose that she was in the depths of
religious despondency which could only be
allayed by the companionship of Ellen ; she also
made it clear that she loathed teaching. Just as
she kept her Angrian dreams from Ellen and from
everyone except perhaps Branwell, who still seems
to have been engaged, wherever he was, in com-
passing Zamorna's downfall,1 so, even if she knew
1 Charlotte's secret outpourings at Roe Head contain the
following diary notes:
"About a week since, I got a letter from Branwell containing
a most exquisitely characteristic epistle from Northangerland to
his daughter ... I lived on its contents for days " ; and
" I wonder if Branwell has really killed the Duchess. Is she
dead ? Is she buried ? Is she alone in the cold earth on this