7/22/2023 0 Comments Covert glances![]() ![]() Still, I knew not where I was only in time I saw I had been removed from the spot where I fell: I lay on no portico-step night and tempest were excluded by walls, windows and ceiling.But the faculties soon settled each in his place the life-machine presently resumed its wonted and regular working. I should have understood what we call a ghost, as well as I did the commonest object: which is another way of intimating that all my eye rested on struck it as spectral. At first I knew nothing I looked on: a wall was not a wall - a lamp not a lamp. The returning sense of sight came upon me, red, as if it swam in blood suspended hearing rushed back loud, like thunder consciousness revived in fear: I sat up appalled, wondering into what region, amongst what strange beings I was waking. The divorced mates, Spirit and Substance, were hard to re-unite: they greeted each other, not in an embrace, but a racking sort of struggle. I know she re-entered her prison with pain, with reluctance, with a moan and a long shiver.While she so deemed, an angel may have warned her away from heaven's threshold, and, guiding her, weeping, down, have bound her, once more, all shuddering and unwilling, to that poor frame, cold and wasted, of whose companionship she was grown more than weary. She may have gone upward, and come in sight of her eternal home, hoping for leave to rest now, and deeming that her painful union with matter was at last dissolved. Whatever she saw, or wherever she travelled in her trance on that strange night, she kept her own secret never whispering a word to Memory, and baffling Imagination by an indissoluble silence. Where my soul went during that swoon I cannot tell.Charlotte Brontë, Villette (1853) VOLUME TWO ![]()
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