And again:  “In Shirley’s nature prevailed at times an easy indolence:  there were periods when she took delight in perfect vacancy of hand and eye—­moments when her thoughts, her simple existence, the fact of the world being around—­and heaven above her, seemed to yield her such fulness of happiness, that she did not need to lift a finger to increase the joy.  Often, after an active morning, she would spend a sunny afternoon in lying stirless on the turf, at the foot of some tree of friendly umbrage:  no society did she need but that of Caroline, and it sufficed if she were within call; no spectacle did she ask but that of the deep blue sky, and such cloudlets as sailed afar and aloft across its span; no sound but that of the bee’s hum, the leaf’s whisper.”

There are phrases in Louis Moore’s diary that bring Emily Bronte straight before us in her swift and vivid life.  Shirley is “Sister of the spotted, bright, quick-fiery leopard.”  “Pantheress!—­beautiful forest-born!—­wily, tameless, peerless nature!  She gnaws her chain.  I see the white teeth working at the steel!  She has dreams of her wild woods, and pinings after virgin freedom.”  “How evanescent, fugitive, fitful she looked—­slim and swift as a Northern streamer!” “...  With her long hair flowing full and wavy; with her noiseless step, her pale cheek, her eye full of night and lightning, she looked, I thought, spirit-like—­a thing made of an element—­the child of a breeze and a flame—­the daughter of ray and raindrop—­a thing never to be overtaken, arrested, fixed.”

Like Emily she is not “caught”.  “But if I were,” she says, “do you know what soothsayers I would consult?...  The little Irish beggar that comes barefoot to my door; the mouse that steals out of the cranny in the wainscot; the bird that in frost and snow pecks at my window for a crumb; the dog that licks my hand and sits beside my knee.”

And yet again:  “She takes her sewing occasionally:  but, by some fatality, she is doomed never to sit steadily at it for above five minutes at a time:  her thimble is scarcely fitted on, her needle scarce threaded, when a sudden thought calls her upstairs; perhaps she goes to seek some just-then-remembered old ivory-backed needle-book, or older china-topped work-box, quite unneeded, but which seems at the moment indispensable; perhaps to arrange her hair, or a drawer which she recollects to have seen that morning in a state of curious confusion; perhaps only to take a peep from a particular window at a particular view where Briarfield Church and Rectory are visible, pleasantly bowered in trees.  She has scarcely returned, and again taken up the slip of cambric, or square of half-wrought canvas, when Tartar’s bold scrape and strangled whistle are heard at the porch door, and she must run to open it for him; it is a hot day; he comes in panting; she must convoy him to the kitchen, and see with her own eyes that his water-bowl is replenished.  Through the open kitchen-door the court is visible,