"If I were in heaven ... I should be extremely miserable.... I dreamt once ... I was there, ... heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out ... on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy.[71] ... I cannot express it; but surely you ... have a notion that there is ... an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation if I were entirely contained here? My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliffe's miseries ... my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and _he_ remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger. I should not seem a part of it. [See my remarks on Charlotte Brontë's belief in the elective affinities, page 96-7.] My love for Heathcliffe resembles the eternal rocks beneath.... I _am_ Heathcliffe,--he's always, always in my mind--not as a pleasure, any more than I am a pleasure to myself--but as my own being--so don't talk of our separation again." It is of the barriers which divided the woman of the verses "Apostasy" from her lover that the priest has reminded her. Thus she says:-- "... Did I need that thou shouldst tell What mighty barriers rise To part me from that dungeon-cell Where my loved Walter lies?" The whole history of Charlotte Brontë's Brussels life before us, the fact that an insurmountable barrier--his marriage--separated her from M. Héger, and the fact that she herself consulted[72] a Roman Catholic priest whom I designate as her "Fénélon," advising, like the Mentor of Télémaque,[73] the tempted one to "flee temptation," identify these "barriers" as a covert reference to the circumstances unhappily existing which made intimacy between Miss Brontë and M. Héger dangerous. To quote my words in _The Fortnightly Review_:--"We see why Miss Brontë, herself a Protestant, went to the confessional at Brussels.... We know this was no freak, as also that it was impossible for Charlotte to mention the subject to her sister without attributing it to a freak. More, we perceive now the nature of her confession, and, the "Flee temptation!" note of Fénélon's _Les Aventures de Télémaque_ fresh in our minds, we see why she wrote of her father-confessor in _Villette_, Chapter XV.:-- There was something of Fénelon about that benign old priest; and whatever ... I may think of his Church and creed, ... of himself I must ever retain a grateful recollection. He was kind when I needed kindness; he did me good. May heaven bless him!