Helstone's delight also. They held
many aversions too in common, and could have the comfort of laughing
together over works of false sentimentality and pompous pretension.

Few, Shirley conceived, men or women have the right taste in poetry, the
right sense for discriminating between what is real and what is false.
She had again and again heard very clever people pronounce this or that
passage, in this or that versifier, altogether admirable, which, when
she read, her soul refused to acknowledge as anything but cant,
flourish, and tinsel, or at the best elaborate wordiness, curious,
clever, learned, perhaps, haply even tinged with the fascinating hues of
fancy, but, God knows, as different from real poetry as the gorgeous and
massy vase of mosaic is from the little cup of pure metal; or, to give
the reader a choice of similes, as the milliner's artificial wreath is
from the fresh-gathered lily of the field.

Caroline, she found, felt the value of the true ore, and knew the
deception of the flashy dross. The minds of the two girls being toned in
harmony often chimed very sweetly together.

One evening they chanced to be alone in the oak-parlour. They had passed
a long wet day together without _ennui_. It was now on the edge of dark;
candles were not yet brought in; both, as twilight deepened, grew
meditative and silent. A western wind roared high round the hall,
driving wild clouds and stormy rain up from the far-remote ocean; all
was tempest outside the antique lattices, all deep peace within. Shirley
sat at the window, watching the rack in heaven, the mist on earth,
listening to certain notes of the gale that plained like restless
spirits--notes which, had she not been so young, gay, and healthy, would
have swept her trembling nerves like some omen, some anticipatory dirge.
In this her prime of existence and bloom of beauty they but subdued
vivacity to pensiveness. Snatches of sweet ballads haunted her ear; now
and then she sang a stanza. Her accents obeyed the fitful impulse of the
wind; they swelled as its gusts rushed on, and died as they wandered
away. Caroline, withdrawn to the farthest and darkest end of the room,
her figure just discernible by the ruby shine of the flameless fire,
was pacing to and fro, muttering to herself fragments of well-remembered
poetry. She spoke very low, but Shirley heard her; and while singing
softly, she listened. This was the strain:--

"Obscurest night involved the sky,