CHAPTER X 106
now I was left in my natural element , and beginning to feel the stirring of old emotions . It did not seem as if a prop were withdrawn , but rather as if a motive were gone : it was not the power to be tranquil which had failed me , but the reason for tranquillity was no more . My world had for some years been in Lowood : my experience had been of its rules and systems ; now I remembered that the real world was wide , and that a varied field of hopes and fears , of sensations and excitements , awaited those who had courage to go forth into its expanse , to seek real knowledge of life amidst its perils .
I went to my window , opened it , and looked out . There were the two wings of the building ; there was the garden ; there were the skirts of Lowood ; there was the hilly horizon . My eye passed all other objects to rest on those most remote , the blue peaks ; it was those I longed to surmount ; all within their boundary of rock and heath seemed prison-ground , exile limits . I traced the white road winding round the base of one mountain , and vanishing in a gorge between two ; how I longed to follow it farther ! I recalled the time when I had travelled that very road in a coach ; I remembered descending that hill at twilight ; an age seemed to have elapsed since the day which brought me first to Lowood , and I had never quitted it since . My vacations had all been spent at school : Mrs . Reed had never sent for me to Gateshead ; neither she nor any of her family had ever been to visit me . I had had no communication by letter or message with the outer world : school-rules , school-duties , school-habits and notions , and voices , and faces , and phrases , and costumes , and preferences , and antipathies -- such was what I knew of existence . And now I felt that it was not enough ; I tired of the routine of eight years in one afternoon . I desired liberty ; for liberty I gasped ; for liberty I uttered a prayer ; it seemed scattered on the wind then faintly blowing . I abandoned it and framed a humbler supplication ; for change , stimulus : that petition , too , seemed swept off into vague space : " Then ," I cried , half desperate , " grant me at least a new servitude !"
Here a bell , ringing the hour of supper , called me downstairs .
I was not free to resume the interrupted chain of my reflections till bedtime : even then a teacher who occupied the same room with me kept me from the