ave in times past been as ardent as
those who flock to Grasmere or to Abbotsford.

_Jane Eyre_ is full of this "pathetic fallacy," or aspect of nature
dyed in the human emotions of which it is the mute witness. The storm
in the garden at night when Rochester first offers marriage to his
little governess, and they return to the house drenched in rain and
melted with joy, is a fine example of this power. From first to last,
the correspondence between the local scene and the human drama is a
distinctive mark in _Jane Eyre_.

If I were asked to choose that scene in the whole tale which impresses
itself most on my memory, I should turn to the thirty-sixth chapter
when Jane comes back to have a look at Thornfield Hall, peeps on the
battlemented mansion which she had loved so well, and is struck dumb to
find it burnt out to a mere skeleton--"I looked with timorous joy
toward a stately house: I saw a blackened ruin." The suddenness of
this shock, its unexpected and yet natural catastrophe, its mysterious
imagery of the loves of Edward Rochester and Jane Eyre, and the intense
sympathy which earth, wood, rookery, and ruin seem to feel for the
girl's eagerness, amazement, and horror, have always seemed to me to
reach the highest note of art in romance. It is now forty-seven years
since I first read that piece; and in all these years I have found no
single scene in later fiction which is so vividly and indelibly burnt
into the memory as is this. The whole of this chapter, and what
follows it, is intensely real and true. And the very denoument of the
tale itself--that inevitable bathos into which the romance so often
dribbles out its last inglorious breath--has a manliness and sincerity
of its own: "the sky is no longer a blank to him--the earth no longer a
void."

The famous scene in the twenty-sixth chapter with the interrupted
marriage, when Rochester drags the whole bridal party into the den of
his maniacal wife, the wild struggle with the mad woman, the despair of
Jane--all this is as powerful as anything whatever in English fiction.
It is even a masterpiece of ingenious construction and dramatic action.
It is difficult to form a cool estimate of a piece so intense, so
vivid, and so artful in its mechanism. The whole incident is conceived
with the most perfect reality; the plot is original, startling, and yet
not wholly extravagant. But it must be confessed that the plot is not
worked out in details in a faultless wa