Micah Webber’s Reviews > Jane Eyre > Status Update

No harassing restraint, no repressing of glee and vivacity with him; for with him I was at perfect ease, because I knew I suited him; all I said or did seemed either to console or revive him. Delightful consciousness! It brought to life and light my whole nature: in his presence I thoroughly lived; and he lived in mine. Blind as he was, smiles played over his face, joy dawned on his forehead, his lineaments softened.

I was tempted to cease struggling with him - to rush down the torrent of his will into the gulf of his existence, and there lose my own. I was almost as hard beset by him now as I had been once before, in a different way, by another. I was a fool both times. To have yielded then would have been an error of principle; to have yielded now would have been an error of judgment.

Literally, he lived only to aspire—after what was good and great, certainly; but still he would never rest, nor approve of others resting…

I saw he was of the material from which nature hews her heroes—Christian and Pagan—her lawgivers, her statesmen, her conquerors: a steadfast bulwark for great interests to rest upon; but, at the fireside, too often a cold Cumbria’s column, gloomy and out of place.

My eyes were covered and closed: eddying darkness seemed to swim round me, and reflection came in as black and confused a flow. Self-abandoned, relaxed, and effortless, I seemed to have laid me down in the dried-up bed of a great river; I heard a flood loosened in remote mountains, and felt the torrent come: to rise I had no will, to flee I had no strength. I lay faint, longing to be dead.

“Because,” he said, “I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you…it is as if I had string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. …I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapped; and then I’ve a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly.”

And then I strangled a new-born agony—a deformed thing which I could not persuade myself to own and rear—and ran on.

Feeling without judgment is a washy draught indeed; but judgment untempered by feeling is too bitter and husky a morsel for human deglutition.

“Sir,” I answered, “a wanderer’s repose or a sinner’s reformation should never depend on a fellow-creature. Men and women die; philosopher’s falter in wisdom, and Christian’s in goodness: if anyone you know has suffered and erred, let him look higher than his equals for strength to amend and solace to heal.”

“Your brow professes to say ‘I can live alone, if self-respect and circumstances require me so to do. I need not sell my soul to buy bliss. I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld, or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.’“

[H]is attention was riveted on them, … I might gaze without being observed, … my eyes were drawn involuntarily to his face. I looked, and had an acute pleasure in looking—a precious yet poignant pleasure; pure gold, with a steely point of agony: a pleasure like what the thirst-perishing man might feel who knows the well to which he has crept is poisoned, yet stoops and drinks divine draughts nevertheless.