answer. She seemed to have no interest or pleasure beyond the feeling of
duty, and, when she could get, used to sit alone, and 'make out.' She
told me afterwards, that one evening she had sat in the dressing-room
until it was quite dark, and then observing it all at once, had taken
sudden fright." No doubt she remembered this well when she described a
similar terror getting hold upon Jane Eyre. She says in the story, "I
sat looking at the white bed and overshadowed walls--occasionally turning
a fascinated eye towards the gleaming mirror--I began to recall what I
had heard of dead men troubled in their graves . . . I endeavoured to be
firm; shaking my hair from my eyes, I lifted my head and tried to look
boldly through the dark room; at this moment, a ray from the moon
penetrated some aperture in the blind. No! moon light was still, and
this stirred . . . prepared as my mind was for horror, shaken as my
nerves were by agitation, I thought the swift-darting beam was a herald
of some coming vision from another world. My heart beat thick, my head
grew hot; a sound filled my ears which I deemed the rustling of wings;
something seemed near me." {4}

"From that time," Mary adds, "her imaginations became gloomy or
frightful; she could not help it, nor help thinking. She could not
forget the gloom, could not sleep at night, nor attend in the day.

"She told me that one night, sitting alone, about this time, she heard a
voice repeat these lines:

"'Come thou high and holy feeling,
Shine o'er mountain, flit o'er wave,
Gleam like light o'er dome and shielding.'

"There were eight or ten more lines which I forget. She insisted that
she had not made them, that she had heard a voice repeat them. It is
possible that she had read them, and unconsciously recalled them. They
are not in the volume of poems which the sisters published. She repeated
a verse of Isaiah, which she said had inspired them, and which I have
forgotten. Whether the lines were recollected or invented, the tale
proves such habits of sedentary, monotonous solitude of thought as would
have shaken a feebler mind."

Of course, the state of health thus described came on gradually, and is
not to be taken as a picture of her condition in 1836. Yet even then
there is a despondency in some of her expressions, that too sadly reminds
one of some of Cowper's letters. And it is remarkable how deeply his
poems impressed her. His words, his verses, cam