My hopes were all dead – struck with a subtle doom, such as, in one night, fell on all the first-born in the land of Egypt. I looked on my cherished wishes, yesterday so blooming and glowing; they lay stark, chill, livid – corpses that could never revive.
– Charlotte Bronte
Jane Eyre, Chapter 26. To a despairing Jane it is the death of hope, when her wedding to Rochester is called off because of his mad wife Bertha. In a Biblical allusion she compares their love to the dead first-born of the Egyptians who perished in the tenth plague.