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solace; she had stood me in the stead of mother, governess, and,
latterly, companion. At this period she married, removed with
her husband (a clergyman, an excellent man, almost worthy of such
a wife) to a distant county, and consequently was lost to me.

From the day she left I was no longer the same: with her was gone
every settled feeling, every association that had made Lowood in
some degree a home to me. I had imbibed from her something of her
nature and much of her habits: more harmonious thoughts: what
seemed better regulated feelings had become the inmates of my
mind. I had given in allegiance to duty and order; I was quiet;
I believed I was content: to the eyes of others, usually even to
my own, I appeared a disciplined and subdued character.

But destiny, in the shape of the Rev. Mr. Nasmyth, came between
me and Miss Temple: I saw her in her travelling dress step into
a post-chaise, shortly after the marriage ceremony; I watched
the chaise mount the hill and disappear beyond its brow; and then
retired to my own room, and there spent in solitude the greatest
part of the half-holiday granted in honour of the occasion.

I walked about the chamber most of the time. I imagined myself
only to be regretting my loss, and thinking how to repair it; but
when my reflections were concluded, and I looked up and found that
the afternoon was gone, and evening far advanced, another discovery
dawned on me, namely, that in the interval I had undergone a
transforming process; that my mind had put off all it had borrowed
of Miss Temple -- or rather that she had taken with her the serene
atmosphere I had been breathing in her vicinity -- and that now I
was left in my natural element, and beginning to feel the stirring
of old emotions. It did not seem as if a prop were withdrawn,
but rather as if a motive were gone: it was not the power to be
tranquil which had failed me, but the reason for tranquillity was
no more. My world had for some years been in Lowood: my experience
had been of its rules and systems; now I remembered that the real
world was wide, and that a varied field of hopes and fears, of
sensations and excitements, awaited those who had courage to go
forth into its expanse, to seek real knowledge of life amidst its
perils.

I went to my window, opened it, and looked out. There were the two
wings of the building; there was the garden; there were the skirts
of Lowood; there was the hilly horizon. My eye passed all other
objects to rest on those most remote, the blue peaks; it was those
I longed to surmount; all within their boundary of rock and heath
seemed prison-ground, exile limits. I traced the white road winding
round the base of one mountain, and vanishing in a gorge between
two; how I longed to follow it farther! I recalled the time when
I had travelled that very road in a coach; I remembered descending
that hill at twilight; an age seemed to have elapsed since the day

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