her companions.  With them alone she held communion; and as she watched the soft shadows and the white clouds take their quiet path upon the hills, she beheld in them the symbols of her own ideas,—­the 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 where the eye could not penetrate.

One evening she had lingered longer than usual:  she felt unwilling to depart—­to meet again the dull and wearisome realities of life—­the petty cares that interest and animate mankind.  She loathed her own form and her own species:—­earth was too narrow for her desire, and she almost longed to burst its barriers.  In the deep agony of her spirit she cried aloud—­