Quotation from: Jane Eyre

Written by: Charlotte Bronte


When we left the dining-room, she proposed to show me over the rest
of the house; and I followed her upstairs and downstairs, admiring
as I went; for all was well arranged and handsome. The large front
chambers I thought especially grand: and some of the third-storey
rooms, though dark and low, were interesting from their air of
antiquity. The furniture once appropriated to the lower apartments
had from time to time been removed here, as fashions changed:
and the imperfect light entering by their narrow casement showed
bedsteads of a hundred years old; chests in oak or walnut, looking,
with their strange carvings of palm branches and cherubs' heads,
like types of the Hebrew ark; rows of venerable chairs, high-backed
and narrow; stools still more antiquated, on whose cushioned tops
were yet apparent traces of half-effaced embroideries, wrought by
fingers that for two generations had been coffin-dust. All these
relics gave to the third storey of Thornfield Hall the aspect of a
home of the past: a shrine of memory. I liked the hush, the gloom,
the quaintness of these retreats in the day; but I by no means
coveted a night's repose on one of those wide and heavy beds: shut
in, some of them, with doors of oak; shaded, others, with wrought
old English hangings crusted with thick work, portraying effigies
of strange flowers, and stranger birds, and strangest human beings,
-- all which would have looked strange, indeed, by the pallid gleam
of moonlight.

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