Quotation from: The Professor

Written by: Charlotte Bronte


I need not continue the quotation; the whole devoir was in the
same strain. There were errors of orthography, there were
foreign idioms, there were some faults of construction, there
were verbs irregular transformed into verbs regular; it was
mostly made up, as the above example shows, of short and somewhat
rude sentences, and the style stood in great need of polish and
sustained dignity; yet such as it was, I had hitherto seen
nothing like it in the course of my professorial experience. The
girl's mind had conceived a picture of the hut, of the two
peasants, of the crownless king; she had imagined the wintry
forest, she had recalled the old Saxon ghost-legends, she had
appreciated Alfred's courage under calamity, she had remembered
his Christian education, and had shown him, with the rooted
confidence of those primitive days, relying on the scriptural
Jehovah for aid against the mythological Destiny. This she had
done without a hint from me: I had given the subject, but not
said a word about the manner of treating it.

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