Gentle reader, may you never feel what I then felt! May your eyes never shed such stormy, scalding, heart-wrung tears as poured from mine. May you never appeal to Heaven in prayers so hopeless and so agonised as in that hour left my lips; for never may you, like me, dread to be the instrument of evil to what you wholly love.
– Charlotte Bronte
Jane Eyre, Chapter 27. Here Jane addresses the reader, expressing her heartbreak at leaving Rochester and Thornfield. She dreads that her going may be the cause of the downfall of the man she loves. In her anguish she makes an appeal to Heaven with her prayers.