The village of Haworth stands, steep and gray, on the topmost side of an abrupt low hill. Such hills, more steep than high, are congregated round, circle beyond circle, to the utmost limit of the horizon. Not a wood, not a river. As far as eye can reach these treeless hills, their sides cut into fields by gray walls of stone with here and there a gray stone village, and here and there a gray stone mill, present no other colors than the singular north-country brilliance of the green grass, and the blackish gray of the stone. Now and then a toppling, gurgling mill-beck gives life to the scene. But the real life, the only beauty of the country, is set on the top of all the hills, where moor joins moor from Yorkshire into Lancashire, a coiled chain of wild, free places. White with snow in winter, black at midsummer, it is only when spring dapples the dark heather-stems with the vivid green of the sprouting whortleberry bushes, only when in early autumn the moors are one humming mass of fragrant purple, that any beauty of tint lights up the scene. But there is always a charm in the moors for hardy and solitary spirits. Between them and heaven nothing dares to interpose. The shadows of the coursing clouds alter the aspect of the place a hundred times a day. A hundred little springs and streams well in its soil, making spots of vivid greenness round their rise. A hundred birds of every kind are flying and singing there. Larks sing; cuckoos call; all the tribe of linnets and finches twitter in the bushes; plovers moan; wild ducks fly past; more melancholy than all, on stormy days, the white sea-mews cry, blown so far inland by the force of the gales that sweep irresistibly over the treeless and houseless moors. There in the spring you may take in your hands the weak, halting fledglings of the birds; rabbits and game multiply in the hollows. There in the autumn the crowds of bees, mad in the heather, send the sound of their humming down the village street. The winds, the clouds, Nature and life, must be the friends of those who would love the moors.
A. Mary F. Robinson: ‘Emily Brontë.’ (Famous Women Series). Boston: Roberts Bros., 1883.
The Parsonage.
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 church-yard, 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 church-yard, 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 gray 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. Brontë’s study, the two on the left to the family sitting-room.... 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.
Elizabeth C. Gaskell: ‘Life of Charlotte Brontë,’ Smith, Elder & Co., London, 1857.
Interior of the parsonage.
The interior of the now far-famed parsonage lacked drapery of all kinds. Mr. Brontë’s horror of fire forbade curtains to the windows. There was not much carpet anywhere except in the sitting-room and on the study floor. The hall floor and stairs were done with sand-stone, always beautifully clean, as everything else was about the house; the walls were not papered, but stained in a pretty dove-colored tint; hair-seated chairs and mahogany tables, book-shelves in the study, but not many of these elsewhere.... A little later on, [Miss N. is writing of 1833], there was the addition of a piano.
Ellen Nussey: Article on Charlotte Brontë, Scribner’s Monthly, May, 1871.