A lover finds...

"A lover finds his mistress asleep on a mossy bank...He thought his love slept sweetly but he finds she is stone dead." (Bronte 427).

Bronte uses this image and anecdote as foreshadowing in this passage. She is comparing a man who thinks he has found his lover sleeping but then finds her to be dead to Jane discovering the burnt and destroyed Thornfield Hall. Jane is just as distraught at this discovery as the lover would be to find his lady dead.