images and
reflections,--the hidden world within her made visible. She felt no
sympathy with the realities--the commonplaces of life; her thoughts were
too aspiring for earth, yet found not their resting-place in heaven! It
was no grovelling, degrading superstition which actuated her: she sighed
for powers above her species,--she aspired to hold intercourse with
beings of a superior nature. She would gaze for hours in wild delirium
on the blue sky and starry vault, and wish she were freed from the base
encumbrances of earth, that she might shine out among those glorious
intelligences in regions without a shadow or a cloud. Imagination was
her solace and her curse; she flew to it for relief as the drunkard to
his cup, sparkling and intoxicating for a while, but its dregs were
bitterness and despair. Soon her world of imagination began to quicken;
and, as the wind came sighing through her dark ringlets, or rustling
over the dry grass and heather bushes at her side, she thought a spirit
spoke, or a celestial messenger crossed her path. The unholy rites of
the witches were familiar to her ear, but she spurned their vulgar and
low ambition; she panted for communion with beings more
exalted--demigods and immortals, of whom she had heard as having been
translated to those happier skies, forming the glorious constellations
she beheld. Sometimes fancies wild and horrible assaulted her; she then
shut herself for days in her own chamber, and was heard as though in
converse with invisible things. When freed from this hallucination,
agony was marked on her brow, and her cheek was more than usually pale
and collapsed. She would then wander forth again:--the mountain-breeze
reanimated her spirits, and imagination again became pleasant unto her.
She heard the wild swans winging their way above her, and she thought of
the wild hunters and the spectre-horseman:[41] the short wail of the
curlew, the call of the moor-cock and plover, was the voice of her
beloved. To her all nature wore a charmed life: earth and sky were but
creatures formed for her use, and the ministers of her pleasure.

The Tower of Bernshaw was a small fortified house in the pass over the
hills from Burnley to Todmorden. It stood within a short distance from
the Eagle Crag; and the Lady Sibyl would often climb to the utmost verge
of that overhanging peak, looking from its dizzy height until her soul
expanded, and her thoughts took their flight through those dim regions