This is not all. We know now the truth regarding Charlotte Brontë's Brussels life, and seeing she discovered a pertinence in the state of the Craven Nymph to her own--for it is undeniable Rochester's song was modelled upon the lines Montagu quotes--it is likely that what I term the "river" suggestion and the Craven Elf suggestion which resulted in Charlotte Brontë's portraying herself in the rôle of the stream-named Craven elf, Janet Aire or Eyre, had to do with Montagu's mention of this nymph of Craven who escaped a dangerous persecution by becoming a spring. It seems, indeed, that if she did not at first utilize the parallel of this narrative in verse with her own experience, she yet in _Wuthering Heights_ was influenced by it, in the days which I call the period of the recoil, to represent her hero Heathcliffe as a ruin-creating, semi-human being. Whether the lines-- "It was a Satyr's chance to see her silver hair Flow loosely at her back as up a cliff she clame," had in the connection to do with the "cliffe" in "that ghoul Heathcliffe's" name a reference to Charlotte Brontë's Preface to _Wuthering Heights_, and her words on the creation of Heathcliffe, in my next chapter, may declare. It is now impossible not to understand the origin of the Satyr and Nymph passage and its implication in the chapter of _Jane Eyre_ containing Rochester's song, when he says to Jane in the very same chapter:-- "You shall sojourn at Paris, Rome, and Naples: at Florence, Venice, and Vienna: all the ground I've wandered over shall be retrodden by you: wherever I stamped my hoof, your sylph's foot shall step also." CHAPTER XV. THE RECOIL. II. A ridge of lighted heath, alive, glancing, devouring, would have been a meet emblem of my mind when I accused; ... the same ridge, black and blasted after the flames are dead, would have represented as meetly my subsequent condition when ... reflection had shown me the madness of my conduct, and the dreariness of my hated and hating position. Something of vengeance I had tasted.... As aromatic wine it seemed, on swallowing, warm and racy; its after-flavour, metallic and corroding, gave me a sensation as if I had been poisoned.... I would fain exercise some better faculty than that of fierce speaking--fain find nourishment for some less fiendish feeling than that of sombre indignation.