you to put that book down. You are trying your
eyes by the doubtful firelight."

"No, ma'am, not at all; my eyes are never tired."

At last, however, a pale light falls on the page from the window. She
looks; the moon is up. She closes the volume, rises, and walks through
the room. Her book has perhaps been a good one; it has refreshed,
refilled, rewarmed her heart; it has set her brain astir, furnished her
mind with pictures. The still parlour, the clean hearth, the window
opening on the twilight sky, and showing its "sweet regent," new throned
and glorious, suffice to make earth an Eden, life a poem, for Shirley. A
still, deep, inborn delight glows in her young veins, unmingled,
untroubled, not to be reached or ravished by human agency, because by no
human agency bestowed--the pure gift of God to His creature, the free
dower of Nature to her child. This joy gives her experience of a
genii-life. Buoyant, by green steps, by glad hills, all verdure and
light, she reaches a station scarcely lower than that whence angels
looked down on the dreamer of Bethel, and her eye seeks, and her soul
possesses, the vision of life as she wishes it. No, not as she wishes
it; she has not time to wish. The swift glory spreads out, sweeping and
kindling, and multiplies its splendours faster than Thought can effect
his combinations, faster than Aspiration can utter her longings. Shirley
says nothing while the trance is upon her--she is quite mute; but if
Mrs. Pryor speaks to her now, she goes out quietly, and continues her
walk upstairs in the dim gallery.

If Shirley were not an indolent, a reckless, an ignorant being, she
would take a pen at such moments, or at least while the recollection of
such moments was yet fresh on her spirit. She would seize, she would fix
the apparition, tell the vision revealed. Had she a little more of the
organ of acquisitiveness in her head, a little more of the love of
property in her nature, she would take a good-sized sheet of paper and
write plainly out, in her own queer but clear and legible hand, the
story that has been narrated, the song that has been sung to her, and
thus possess what she was enabled to create. But indolent she is,
reckless she is, and most ignorant; for she does not know her dreams are
rare, her feelings peculiar. She does not know, has never known, and
will die without knowing, the full value of that spring whose bright
fresh bubbling in her heart keeps it green.

Shirley take