Haworth Parsonage

Abstract

IT is an October day, and all the way up the valley of the Aire from Keighley in the bus I can hardly restrain my excitement. What will it be like ? — this place that I know so intimately, that I have known about since my childhood (a tattered copy of Jane Eyre was the only book in the house, besides the family Bible and the Home Preacher) and yet have never set eyes on until now in middle age. It is not often that I have this specific excitement about what a place will be like and what new experience awaits me there, though it happens more often as I grow older. I dreamed of Venice before I went there, and very remote and wonderful it was, like a Turner water-colour — though I saw it all in terms of the bay at home, a starry Gribbin in a haze farther out to sea. I remember the same feeling on my first visit to Stratford, which I postponed long enough: the heightening expectancy as the car went through the Cotswold countryside and drew near the town — as if one were summoned to an audience with Queen Elizabeth I herself.