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PinkMonkey.com Digital Library - PinkMonkey.com Digital Library-Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte


114

through the green water; a fair arm was the only limb clearly
visible, whence the bracelet had been washed or torn.

The second picture contained for foreground only the dim peak of
a hill, with grass and some leaves slanting as if by a breeze.
Beyond and above spread an expanse of sky, dark blue as at
twilight: rising into the sky was a woman’s shape to the bust,
portrayed in tints as dusk and soft as I could combine. The dim
forehead was crowned with a star; the lineaments below were seen
as through the suffusion of vapour; the eyes shone dark and wild;
the hair streamed shadowy, like a beamless cloud torn by storm or
by electric travail. On the neck lay a pale reflection like moonlight;
the same faint lustre touched the train of thin clouds from which
rose and bowed this vision of the Evening Star.

The third showed the pinnacle of an iceberg piercing a polar winter
sky: a muster of northern lights reared their dim lances, close
serried, along the horizon.

Throwing these into distance, rose, in the foreground, a head,- a
colossal head, inclined towards the iceberg, and resting against it.
Two thin hands, joined under the forehead, and supporting it,
drew up before the lower features a sable veil; a brow quite
bloodless, white as bone, and an eye hollow and fixed, blank of
meaning but for the glassiness of despair, alone were visible.
Above the temples, amidst wreathed turban folds of black drapery,
vague in its character and consistency as cloud, gleamed a ring of
white flame, gemmed with sparkles of a more lurid tinge. This pale
crescent was ‘the likeness of a kingly crown’; what it diademed
was ‘the shape which shape had none.’ ‘Were you happy when you
painted these pictures?’ asked Mr. Rochester presently.

‘I was absorbed, sir: yes, and I was happy. To paint them, in short,
was to enjoy one of the keenest pleasures I have ever known.’ ‘That
is not saying much. Your pleasures, by your own account, have
been few; but I daresay you did exist in a kind of artist’s
dreamland while you blent and arranged these strange tints. Did
you sit at them long each day?’ ‘I had nothing else to do, because it
was the vacation, and I sat at them from morning till noon, and
from noon till night: the length of the midsummer days favoured
my inclination to apply.’ ‘And you felt self-satisfied with the result
of your ardent labours?’ ‘Far from it. I was tormented by the
contrast between my idea and my handiwork: in each case I had
imagined something which I was quite powerless to realise.’ ‘Not
quite: you have secured the shadow of your thought; but no more,
probably. You had not enough of the artist’s skill and science to
give it full being: yet the drawings are, for a school-girl, peculiar.
As to the thoughts, they are elfish.
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PinkMonkey.com Digital Library - PinkMonkey.com Digital Library-Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte



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