The Leeds and Skipton railway runs along a deep valley of the
Aire; a slow and sluggish stream, compared to the neighbouring
river of Wharfe.  Keighley station is on this line of railway,
about a quarter of a mile from the town of the same name.  The
number of inhabitants and the importance of Keighley have been
very greatly increased during the last twenty years, owing to the
rapidly extended market for worsted manufactures, a branch of
industry that mainly employs the factory population of this part
of Yorkshire, which has Bradford for its centre and metropolis.

Keighley is in process of transformation from a populous, old-
fashioned village, into a still more populous and flourishing
town.  It is evident to the stranger, that as the gable-ended
houses, which obtrude themselves corner-wise on the widening
street, fall vacant, they are pulled down to allow of greater
space for traffic, and a more modern style of architecture.  The
quaint and narrow shop-windows of fifty years ago, are giving way
to large panes and plate-glass.  Nearly every dwelling seems
devoted to some branch of commerce.  In passing hastily through
the town, one hardly perceives where the necessary lawyer and
doctor can live, so little appearance is there of any dwellings of
the professional middle-class, such as abound in our old cathedral
towns.  In fact, nothing can be more opposed than the state of
society, the modes of thinking, the standards of reference on all
points of morality, manners, and even politics and religion, in
such a new manufacturing place as Keighley in the north, and any
stately, sleepy, picturesque cathedral town in the south.  Yet the
aspect of Keighley promises well for future stateliness, if not
picturesqueness.  Grey stone abounds; and the rows of houses built
of it have a kind of solid grandeur connected with their uniform
and enduring lines.  The frame-work of the doors, and the lintels
of the windows, even in the smallest dwellings, are made of blocks
of stone.  There is no painted wood to require continual
beautifying, or else present a shabby aspect; and the stone is
kept scrupulously clean by the notable Yorkshire housewives.  Such
glimpses into the interior as a passer-by obtains, reveal a rough
abundance of the means of living, and diligent and active habits
in the women.  But the voices of the people are hard, and their
tones discordant, promising little of the musical taste that
distinguishes the district, and which has already furnished a
Carrodus to the musical world.  The names over the shops (of which
the one just given is a sample) seem strange even to an inhabitant
of the neighbouring county, and have a peculiar smack and flavour
of the place.

The town of Keighley never quite melts into country on the road to
Haworth, although the houses become more sparse as the traveller
journeys upwards to the grey round hills that seem to bound his
journey in a westerly direction.  First come some villas; just
sufficiently retired from the road to show that they can scarcely
belong to any one liable to be summoned in a hurry, at the call of
suffering or danger, from his comfortable fire-side; the lawyer,
the doctor, and the clergyman, live at hand, and hardly in the
suburbs, with a screen of shrubs for concealment.

In a town one does not look for vivid colouring; what there may be
of this is furnished by the wares in the shops, not by foliage or
atmospheric effects; but in the country some brilliancy and
vividness seems to be instinctively expected, and there is
consequently a slight feeling of disappointment at the grey
neutral tint of every object, near or far off, on the way from
Keighley to Haworth.  The distance is about four miles; and, as I
have said, what with villas, great worsted factories, rows of
workmen's houses, with here and there an old-fashioned farmhouse
and outbuildings, it can hardly be called "country" any part of
the way.  For two miles the road passes over tolerably level
ground, distant hills on the left, a "beck" flowing through
meadows on the right, and furnishing water power, at certain
points, to the factories built on its banks.  The air is dim and
lightless with the smoke from all these habitations and places of
business.  The soil in the valley (or "bottom," to use the local
term) is rich; but, as the road begins to ascend, the vegetation
becomes poorer; it does not flourish, it merely exists; and,
instead of trees, there are only bushes and shrubs about the
dwellings.  Stone dykes are everywhere used in place of hedges;
and what crops there are, on the patches of arable land, consist
of pale, hungry-looking, grey green oats.  Right before the
traveller on this road rises Haworth village; he can see it for
two miles before he arrives, for it is situated on the side of a
pretty steep hill, with a back-ground of dun and purple moors,
rising and sweeping away yet higher than the church, which is
built at the very summit of the long narrow street.  All round the
horizon there is this same line of sinuous wave-like hills; the
scoops into which they fall only revealing other hills beyond, of
similar colour and shape, crowned with wild, bleak moors--grand,
from the ideas of solitude and loneliness which they suggest, or
oppressive from the feeling which they give of being pent-up by
some monotonous and illimitable barrier, according to the mood of
mind in which the spectator may be.

For a short distance the road appears to turn away from Haworth,
as it winds round the base of the shoulder of a hill; but then it
crosses a bridge over the "beck," and the ascent through the
village begins.  The flag-stones with which it is paved are placed
end-ways, in order to give a better hold to the horses' feet; and,
even with this help, they seem to be in constant danger of
slipping backwards.  The old stone houses are high compared to the
width of the street, which makes an abrupt turn before reaching
the more level ground at the head of the village, so that the
steep aspect of the place, in one part, is almost like that of a
wall.  But this surmounted, the church lies a little off the main
road on the left; a hundred yards, or so, and the driver relaxes
his care, and the horse breathes more easily, as they pass into
the quite little by-street that leads to Haworth Parsonage.  The
churchyard is on one side of this lane, the school-house and the
sexton's dwelling (where the curates formerly lodged) on the
other.

The parsonage stands at right angles to the road, facing down upon
the church; so that, in fact, parsonage, church, and belfried
school-house, form three sides of an irregular oblong, of which
the fourth is open to the fields and moors that lie beyond.  The
area of this oblong is filled up by a crowded churchyard, and a
small garden or court in front of the clergyman's house.  As the
entrance to this from the road is at the side, the path goes round
the corner into the little plot of ground.  Underneath the windows
is a narrow flower-border, carefully tended in days of yore,
although only the most hardy plants could be made to grow there.
Within the stone wall, which keeps out the surrounding churchyard,
are bushes of elder and lilac; the rest of the ground is occupied
by a square grass-plot and a gravel walk.  The house is of grey
stone, two stories high, heavily roofed with flags, in order to
resist the winds that might strip off a lighter covering.  It
appears to have been built about a hundred years ago, and to
consist of four rooms on each story; the two windows on the right
(as the visitor stands with his back to the church, ready to enter
in at the front door) belonging to Mr. Bronte's study, the two on
the left to the family sitting-room.  Everything about the place
tells of the most dainty order, the most exquisite cleanliness.
The door-steps are spotless; the small old-fashioned window-panes
glitter like looking-glass.  Inside and outside of that house
cleanliness goes up into its essence, purity.

The little church lies, as I mentioned, above most of the houses
in the village; and the graveyard rises above the church, and is
terribly full of upright tombstones.  The chapel or church claims
greater antiquity than any other in that part of the kingdom; but
there is no appearance of this in the external aspect of the
present edifice, unless it be in the two eastern windows, which
remain unmodernized, and in the lower part of the steeple.
Inside, the character of the pillars shows that they were
constructed before the reign of Henry VII.  It is probable that
there existed on this ground, a "field-kirk," or oratory, in the
earliest times; and, from the Archbishop's registry at York, it is
ascertained that there was a chapel at Haworth in 1317.  The
inhabitants refer inquirers concerning the date to the following
inscription on a stone in the church tower:-


"Hic fecit Caenobium Monachorum Auteste fundator.  A. D.
sexcentissimo."


That is to say, before the preaching of Christianity in
Northumbria.  Whitaker says that this mistake originated in the
illiterate copying out, by some modern stone-cutter, of an
inscription in the character of Henry the Eighth's time on an
adjoining stone:-


"Orate pro bono statu Eutest Tod."

"Now every antiquary knows that the formula of prayer 'bono statu'
always refers to the living.  I suspect this singular Christian
name has been mistaken by the stone-cutter for Austet, a
contraction of Eustatius, but the word Tod, which has been mis-
read for the Arabic figures 600, is perfectly fair and legible.
On the presumption of this foolish claim to antiquity, the people
would needs set up for independence, and contest the right of the
Vicar of Bradford to nominate a curate at Haworth."


I have given this extract, in order to explain the imaginary
groundwork of a commotion which took place in Haworth about five
and thirty years ago, to which I shall have occasion to allude
again more particularly.

The interior of the church is commonplace; it is neither old
enough nor modern enough to compel notice.  The pews are of black
oak, with high divisions; and the names of those to whom they
belong are painted in white letters on the doors.  There are
neither brasses, nor altar-tombs, nor monuments, but there is a
mural tablet on the right-hand side of the communion-table,
bearing the following inscription:-


HERE
LIE THE REMAINS OF
MARIA BRONTE, WIFE
OF THE
REV. P. BRONTE, A.B., MINISTER OP HAWORTH.
HER SOUL
DEPARTED TO THE SAVIOUR, SEPT. 15TH, 1821,
IN THE 39TH YEAR OF HER AGE.

"Be ye also ready:  for in such an hour as ye think not the Son of
Man cometh."  MATTHEW xxiv. 44.

ALSO HERE LIE THE REMAINS OF
MARIA BRONTE, DAUGHTER OF THE AFORESAID;
SHE DIED ON THE
6TH OF MAY, 1825, IN THE 12TH YEAR OF HER AGE;
AND OF
ELIZABETH BRONTE, HER SISTER,
WHO DIED JUNE 15TH, 1825, IN THE 11TH YEAR OF HER AGE.

"Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as
little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven."--
MATTHEW xviii. 3.

HERE ALSO LIE THE REMAINS OF
PATRICK BRANWELL BRONTE,
WHO DIED SEPT. 24TH, 1848, AGED 3O YEARS;
AND OF
EMILY JANE BRONTE,
WHO DIED DEC. 19TH, 1848, AGED 29 YEARS,
SON AND DAUGHTER OF THE
REV. P. BRONTE, INCUMBENT.

THIS STONE IS ALSO DEDICATED TO THE
MEMORY OF ANNE BRONTE, {1}
YOUNGEST DAUGHTER OF THE REV. P. BRONTE, A.B.
SHE DIED, AGED 27 YEARS, MAY 28TH, 1849,
AND WAS BURIED AT THE OLD CHURCH, SCARBORO.'


At the upper part of this tablet ample space is allowed between
the lines of the inscription; when the first memorials were
written down, the survivors, in their fond affection, thought
little of the margin and verge they were leaving for those who
were still living.  But as one dead member of the household
follows another fast to the grave, the lines are pressed together,
and the letters become small and cramped.  After the record of
Anne's death, there is room for no other.

But one more of that generation--the last of that nursery of six
little motherless children--was yet to follow, before the
survivor, the childless and widowed father, found his rest.  On
another tablet, below the first, the following record has been
added to that mournful list:-


ADJOINING LIE THE REMAINS OF
CHARLOTTE, WIFE
OF THE
REV. ARTHUR BELL NICHOLLS, A.B.,
AND DAUGHTER OF THE REV. P.  BRONTE, A.B., INCUMBENT
SHE DIED MARCH 31ST, 1855, IN THE 39TH
YEAR OF HER AGE. {2}


This tablet, which corrects the error in the former tablet as to
the age of Anne Bronte, bears the following inscription in Roman
letters; the initials, however, being in old English.

In Memory of
Maria, wife of the Rev. P. Bronte, A.B., Minister of Haworth,
She died Sept. 15th, 1821, in the 39th year of her age.
Also, of Maria, their daughter, who died May 6th, 1825, in the
12th year of her age.
Also, of Elizabeth, their daughter, who died June 15th, 1825, in
the 11th year of her age.
Also, of Patrick Branwell, their son, who died Sept. 24th, 1848,
aged 31 years.
Also, of Emily Jane, their daughter, who died Dec. 19th, 1848,
aged 30 years.
Also, of Anne, their daughter, who died May 28th, 1849, aged 29
years.  She was buried at the Old Church, Scarborough.
Also, of Charlotte, their daughter, wife of the Rev. A. B.
Nicholls, B.A.  She died March 31st, 1855, in the 39th year of her
age.
"The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is the law,
but thanks be to God which giveth us the victory through our Lord
Jesus Christ."--1 Cor. xv. 56, 57.

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