But wide as pathless[79] was the space
That lay, our lives, between,
And dangerous as the foamy race
Of ocean-surges green.
And haunted as a robber-path
Through wilderness or wood;
For Might and Right, and Woe and Wrath,
Between our spirits stood.[80]
I dangers dared; I hindrance scorned;
I omens did defy:
Whatever menaced, harassed, warned,[81]
I passed impetuous by.
On sped my rainbow, fast as light;
I flew as in a dream;
For glorious rose upon my sight
That child of Shower and Gleam.
Still bright on clouds of suffering dim
Shines that soft, solemn joy;
Nor care I now, how dense and grim
Disasters gather nigh;
I care not in this moment sweet,
Though all I have rushed o'er
Should come on pinion, strong and fleet,
Proclaiming vengeance sore."
It is clear the impediment of M. Héger's marriage is suggested in these verses. But undeniable evidence as to Charlotte Brontë's having escaped by flight what she considered a most dangerous temptation, is the fact that we find she was influenced to pen these lines, wherein M. Héger (Rochester) is likened to a wild pursuer of a "shower and gleam" nymph who sped before him "fast as light" and "glorious rose upon his sight," by Montagu's reference, in Gleanings in Craven, to the story of a Craven nymph a satyr pursued yet lost by her being changed into a spring. Says Frederic Montagu:—
"In the Polyolbion, published in 1612, is the following passage:—
In all my spacious tract let them (so wise) survey
Thy Ribble's rising banks, their worst and let them say;
At Giggleswick, where I a fountain can you show,
That eight times in a day is said to ebb and flow!
Who sometime was a Nymph, and in the mountains high
Of Craven, whose blue heads, for caps put on the sky,
Among the Oreads there, and Sylvans, made abode
(It was ere human foot upon these hills had trod),
Of all the mountain kind, and since she was most fair;
It was a Satyr's chance to see her silver hair
Flow loosely at her back, as up a cliff she clame,
Her beauties noting well, her features and her frame,
And after her he goes; which when she did espy,
Before him like the wind, the nimble Nymph did fly:
They hurry down the rocks, o'er hill and dale they drive,
To take her he doth strain, t' outstrip him she doth strive,
Like one his kind that knew, and greatly feared....
And to the Topic Gods by praying to escape,
They turned her to a Spring, which as she then did pant,
When, wearied with her course, her breath grew wond'rous scant,
Even as the fearful Nymph, then thick and short did blow,
Now made by them a Spring, so doth she ebb and flow."
This is not all. We know now the truth regarding Charlotte Brontë's Brussels life, and seeing she discovered a pertinence in the state of the Craven Nymph to her own—for it is undeniable Rochester's song was modelled upon the lines Montagu quotes—it is likely that what I term the "river" suggestion and the Craven Elf suggestion which resulted in Charlotte Brontë's portraying herself in the rôle of the stream-named Craven elf, Janet Aire or Eyre, had to do with Montagu's mention of this nymph of Craven who escaped a dangerous persecution by becoming a spring. It seems, indeed, that if she did not at first utilize the parallel of this narrative in verse with her own experience, she yet in Wuthering Heights was influenced by it, in the days which I call the period of the recoil, to represent her hero Heathcliffe as a ruin-creating, semi-human being. Whether the lines—