Charlotte alone on the moors.
“I am free to walk on the moors; but when I go out there alone, everything reminds me of the times when others were with me, and then the moors seem a wilderness, featureless, solitary, saddening. My sister Emily had a particular love for them, and there is not a knoll of heath, not a branch of fern, not a young bilberry-leaf, not a fluttering lark or linnet, but reminds me of her. The distant prospects were Anne’s delight, and when I look round, she is in the blue tints, the pale mists, the waves and shadows of the horizon. In the hill-country silence, their poetry comes by lines and stanzas into my mind: once I loved it; now I dare not read it.”
Charlotte Brontë: Letter, quoted by Mrs. Gaskell.
Wearied out by the vividness of her sorrowful recollections, she sought relief in long walks on the moors. A friend of hers gives an anecdote which may well come in here.
Anecdote of the old woman’s “cofe.”
“They are mistaken in saying that she was too weak to roam the hills for the benefit of the air. I do not think any one, certainly not any woman in this locality, went so much on the moors as she did, when the weather permitted. Indeed, she was so much in the habit of doing so, that people, who live quite away on the edge of the common, knew her perfectly well. I remember on one occasion an old woman saw her at a little distance, and she called out ‘How! Miss Brontë! Hey yah (have you) seen aught o’ my cofe (calf)?’ Miss Brontë told her she could not say, for she did not know it. ‘Well!’ she said, ‘Yah know, it’s getting up like nah (now), between a cah (cow) and a cofe—what we call a stirk, yah know, Miss Brontë; will yah turn it this way if yah happen to see’t, as yah’re going back, Miss Brontë; nah do, Miss Brontë.’”
Mrs. Gaskell: ‘Life of Charlotte Brontë.’