Thus their stay in Brussels was suddenly cut short, and their studies were interrupted; but they had learned a good deal during their stay there. Monsieur Héger wrote to console Mr. Brontë on his loss; and said that in another year the two girls would have been secured against the eventualities of the future. They were being instructed, and, at the same time, were acquiring the art of instruction: Emily was learning the piano, and receiving lessons from the best Belgian professors; and she had little pupils herself. 'Elle perdait donc à la fois un reste d'ignorance et un reste plus gênant encore de timidité.' Charlotte was beginning to give French lessons, and to gain 'cette assurance, cet aplomb si nécessaire dans l'enseignement.' It was this kind letter from Monsieur Héger that afterwards induced Mr. Brontë to allow Charlotte to return to Brussels. CHAPTER II. OTHER POEMS. Branwell at the Parsonage: his Loneliness--'The Epicurean's Song'--'Song'--Northangerland--'Noah's Warning over Methusaleh's Grave'--Letter to Mr. Grundy--Miss Branwell's Death--Her Will--Her Nephew Remembered--Injustice done to Him in this Matter by the Biographers of his Sisters. During the absence of his sisters Charlotte and Emily in Brussels, and while Anne was away as a governess, Branwell no doubt felt lonely at the parsonage at Haworth; but he appears to have sought consolation from his troubles in the soothing influences of music and poetry. He knew that these employments softened many of the difficulties that beset the road of human life, and that they introduced men into a purer and nobler sphere than that which is called reality. He felt that they led 'the spirit on, in an ecstasy of admiration, of sweet sorrow, or of unearthly joy, to the music of harmonious, and not wholly intelligible words, raising in the mind beauteous and transcendent images.' Whatever may have been said as to Branwell's proneness to self-indulgence, and his enjoyment of society, even that of 'The Bull,' and of the corrupt of Haworth, none of his alleged depravity and coarseness of disposition disfigured his verses, however deficient his early effusions may have been in the higher excellencies of the Muse. From the general tenor of his writings, which is religious and sometimes philosophical, he seems, under his misfortunes, which were ever with him in one shape or another, to have sought consolation in the shadowed paths of poetry and reflection. Some lights now and then diversify the general gloom of his stanzas; but, even then, an air of sadness still pervades them. More I shall find to say on the special features of Branwell's poems in the later pages of the present work. He wrote the following verses in 1842: THE EPICUREAN'S SONG. 'The visits of Sorrow Say, why should we mourn? Since the sun of to-morrow May shine on its urn; And all that we think such pain Will have departed,--then Bear for a moment what cannot return;