“It is strange,” pursued he, “that while I love Rosamond Oliver so wildly – with all the intensity, indeed, of a first passion, the object of which is exquisitely beautiful, graceful, fascinating – I experience at the same time a calm, unwarped consciousness that she would not make me a good wife; that she is not the partner suited to me; that I should discover this within a year after marriage; and that to twelve months’ rapture would succeed a lifetime of regret. This I know.”
– Charlotte Bronte
Jane Eyre, Chapter 32. St. John Rivers displays his cold and unemotional side in this speech. Describing his mixed feelings about Rosamond, he speaks in a calm, almost disinterested way about his intense love for her, and how unsuitable she is as a missioner’s wife.