an old one, or buying a new one, the familiar volume, which had been
hungrily read by all the members of the family, was sometimes in such a
condition that the bedroom shelf was considered its fitting place. Up
and down the house were to be found many standard works of a solid
kind. Sir Walter Scott's writings, Wadsworth's and Southey's poems
were among the lighter literature; while, as having a character of
their own--earnest, wild, and occasionally fanatical, may be named some
of the books which came from the Branwell side of the family--from the
Cornish followers of the saintly John Wesley--and which are touched on
in the account of the works to which Caroline Helstone had access in
"Shirley": "Some venerable Lady's Magazines, that had once performed a
voyage with their owner, and undergone a storm"--(possibly part of the
relics of Mrs. Brontë's possessions, contained in the ship wrecked on
the coast of Cornwall)--"and whose pages were stained with salt water;
some mad Methodist Magazines full of miracles and apparitions, and
preternatural warnings, ominous dreams, and frenzied fanaticism; and
the equally mad Letters of Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe from the Dead to the
Living."

Mr. Brontë encouraged a taste for reading in his girls; and though Miss
Branwell kept it in due bounds by the variety of household occupations,
in which she expected them not merely to take a part, but to become
proficients, thereby occupying regularly a good portion of every day,
they were allowed to get books from the circulating library at
Keighley; and many a happy walk up those long four miles must they have
had burdened with some new book into which they peeped as they hurried
home. Not that the books were what would generally be called new; in
the beginning of 1833 the two friends [Charlotte and "E.," a school
friend] seem almost simultaneously to have fallen upon "Kenilworth,"
and Charlotte writes as follows about it: