The
wild rains of the day are abated: the great single cloud disappears and
rolls away from Heaven, not passing and leaving a sea all sapphire, but
tossed buoyant before a continued, long-sounding, high-rushing moonlight
tempest. . . No Endymion will watch for his goddess to-night: there are
no flocks on the mountains." See, too, this ocean: "The sway of the
whole Great Deep above a herd of whales rushing through the livid and
liquid thunder down from the frozen zone." And this promise of the
visionary Shirley: "I am to be walking by myself on deck, rather late of
an August evening, watching and being watched by a full harvest moon:
something is to rise white on the surface of the sea, over which that
moon mounts silent, and hangs glorious. . . I think I hear it cry with an
articulate voice. . . I show you an image fair as alabaster emerging from
the dim wave."
Charlotte Bronte knew well the experience of dreams. She seems to have
undergone the inevitable dream of mourners--the human dream of the
Labyrinth, shall I call it? the uncertain spiritual journey in search of
the waiting and sequestered dead, which is the obscure subject of the
"Eurydice" of Coventry Patmore's Odes. There is the lately dead, in
exile, remote, betrayed, foreign, indifferent, sad, forsaken by some
vague malice or neglect, sought by troubled love astray.
In Charlotte Bronte's page there is an autumnal and tempestuous dream.
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