I suppose I have a considerable organ of veneration, for I retain yet the sense of admiring awe with which my eyes traced her steps.
Chapter 5 · Narrator
Context
Jane watches Miss Temple enter the schoolroom the morning after her arrival and describes the strong impression the superintendent makes on her.
Analysis
The phrase 'organ of veneration' is pseudo-scientific vocabulary borrowed from phrenology, the Victorian belief that skull shape revealed personality traits. By invoking it half-seriously, Jane frames her admiration for Miss Temple through the intellectual idiom of her time, but then immediately undercuts the clinical tone with 'admiring awe'—a phrase rooted in feeling, not measurement. The effect is to show Jane trying on adult analytical language while still responding with a child's unguarded emotion.
Essay Tip
Support a thesis that Jane's narrative voice is marked by her attempt to reconcile Romantic feeling with Victorian rationalism—this sentence captures her moving between phrenological jargon and genuine awe, unable to settle on one mode of understanding.