Authors, English -- 19th century -- Biography; Brontë family
Here it is. "Already the pavement was drying; a balmy and fresh breeze
stirred the air, purified by lightning; I left the west behind me, where
spread a sky like opal, azure inmingled with crimson; the enlarged sun,
glorious in Tyrian dyes, dipped his brim already; stepping, as I was,
eastward, I faced a vast bank of clouds, but also I had before me the
arch of an even rainbow; a perfect rainbow--high, wide, vivid. I looked
long; my eye drank in the scene, and I suppose my brain must have
absorbed it; for that night, after lying awake in pleasant fever a long
time, watching the silent sheet-lightning, which still played among the
retreating clouds, and flashed silvery over the stars, I at last fell
asleep; and then in a dream was reproduced the setting sun, the bank of
clouds, the mighty rainbow. I stood, methought, on a terrace; I leaned
over a parapeted wall; there was space below me, depth I could not
fathom, but hearing an endless splash of waves, I believed it to be the
sea; sea spread to the horizon; sea of changeful green and intense blue;
all was soft in the distance; all vapour-veiled. A spark of gold
glistened on the line between water and air, floated up, appeared,
enlarged, changed; the object hung midway between heaven and earth,
under the arch of the rainbow; the soft but dark clouds diffused behind.
It hovered as on wings; pearly, fleecy, gleaming air streamed like
raiment round it; light, tinted with carnation, coloured what seemed
face and limbs; a large star shone with still lustre on an angel's
forehead--" But the angel ruins it.
And this is all, and it leaves the dreariness more dreary. In _The
Professor_ you wander through a world where there is no sound, no
colour, no vibration; a world muffled and veiled in the stillness and
the greyness of the hour before dawn. It is the work of a woman who is
not perfectly alive. So far from having had her great awakening,
Charlotte is only half awake. Her intellect is alert enough and avid,
faithful and subservient to the fact. It is her nerves and senses that
are asleep. Her soul is absent from her senses.
* * * * *
But in _Jane Eyre_, she is not only awakened, but awake as she has never
been awake before, with all her virgin senses exquisitely alive, every
nerve changed to intense vibration. Sometimes she is perniciously awake;
she is doing appalling things, things unjustifiable, preposterous;
things that would have meant perdition to any other writer; she sees
with wild, erroneous eyes; but the point is that she sees, that she
keeps moving, that from the first page to the last she is never once
asleep. To come to _Jane Eyre_ after _The Professor_ is to pass into
another world of feeling and of vision.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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