Page:Daughters of Genius.djvu/45

"There is a spot mid barren hills
 Where winter howls and driving rain;
But, if the dreary tempest chills,
 There is a light that warms again.

"The house is old, the trees are bare,
 Moonless above bends twilight's dome;
But what on earth is half so dear—
 So longed for—as the hearth of home?

"The mute bird sitting on the stone,
 The dark moss dripping from the wall,
The thorn-tree gaunt, the walks o'ergrown,
 I love them; how I love them all!

"And, as I mused, the naked room,
 The alien firelight died away,
And from the midst of cheerless gloom
 I passed to bright, unclouded day.

"A little and a lone green lane
 That opened on a common wide,
A distant, dreary, dim, blue chain
 Of mountains circling every side;

"A heaven so dear, an earth so calm,
 So sweet, so soft, so hushed an air,
And deepening still the dream-like charm
 Wild moor-sheep feeding everywhere.

"That was the scene, I knew it well;
 I knew the turfy pathway's sweep,
That, winding o'er each billowy swell,
 Marked out the tracks of wandering sheep."

··················· Dark days followed the return of the sisters from Brussels. Their long-cherished scheme of the girls' boarding-school was destined never to be realized. Haworth was too remote in situation and too forbidding in aspect to attract scholars, and, in spite of the neatly printed circulars which they issued, and of the earnest