ng light?
Is it the Moon again?

Kind Heaven! increase that silvery gleam
And bid these clouds depart,
And let her soft celestial beam
Restore my fainting heart!

SELECTIONS FROM THE LITERARY REMAINS OF ELLIS AND ACTON BELL.

By Currer Bell

SELECTIONS FROM POEMS BY ELLIS BELL.

It would not have been difficult to compile a volume out of the papers
left by my sisters, had I, in making the selection, dismissed from my
consideration the scruples and the wishes of those whose written
thoughts these papers held. But this was impossible: an influence,
stronger than could be exercised by any motive of expediency,
necessarily regulated the selection. I have, then, culled from the mass
only a little poem here and there. The whole makes but a tiny nosegay,
and the colour and perfume of the flowers are not such as fit them for
festal uses.

It has been already said that my sisters wrote much in childhood and
girlhood. Usually, it seems a sort of injustice to expose in print the
crude thoughts of the unripe mind, the rude efforts of the unpractised
hand; yet I venture to give three little poems of my sister Emily's,
written in her sixteenth year, because they illustrate a point in her
character.

At that period she was sent to school. Her previous life, with the
exception of a single half-year, had been passed in the absolute
retirement of a village parsonage, amongst the hills bordering Yorkshire
and Lancashire. The scenery of these hills is not grand--it is not
romantic it is scarcely striking. Long low moors, dark with heath, shut
in little valleys, where a stream waters, here and there, a fringe of
stunted copse. Mills and scattered cottages chase romance from these
valleys; it is only higher up, deep in amongst the ridges of the moors,
that Imagination can find rest for the sole of her foot: and even if she
finds it there, she must be a solitude-loving raven--no gentle dove. If
she demand beauty to inspire her, she must bring it inborn: these moors
are too stern to yield any product so delicate. The eye of the gazer
must ITSELF brim with a "purple light," intense enough to perpetuate the
brief flower-flush of August on the heather, or the rare sunset-smile of
June; out of his heart must well the freshness, that in latter spring
and early summer brightens the bracken, nurtures the moss, and cherishes
the starry flowers that spangle for a few weeks the pasture of the
moor-sheep.