range and limited scope of his own insatiable thought.  His power of expressing all that he saw and felt, so delicately, so humorously, and at times so tenderly, must have beguiled his sadness more than he knew.  It was Ruskin who said that he could never fit the two sides of the puzzle together—­on the one side the awful dejection and despondency which Carlyle always claimed to feel in the presence of his work, as a dredger in lakes of mud and as a sorter of mountains of rubbish, and on the other side the endless relish for salient traits, and the delighted apprehension of quality which emerges so clearly in all he wrote.

But it is clear that Carlyle suffered ceaselessly, though never unutterably.  He was a matchless artist, with an unequalled gift of putting into vivid words everything he experienced; but his sadness was a disease of the imagination, a fear, not of anything definite—­ for he never even saw the anxieties that were nearest to him—­but a nightmare dream of chaos and whirling forces all about him, a dread of slipping off his own very fairly comfortable perch into oceans of confusion and dismay.

XIII

CHARLOTTE BRONTE

I doubt if the records of intimate biography contain a finer object-lesson against fear and all its obsessions than the life of Charlotte Bronte.  She was of a temperament which in many ways was more open to the assaults of fear than any which could well be devised.  She was frail and delicate, liable to acute nervous depression, intensely shy and sensitive, and susceptible as well; that is to say that her shyness did not isolate her from her kind; she wanted to be loved, respected, even admired.  When she did love, she loved with fire and passion and desperate loyalty.

Her life was from beginning to end full of sharp and tragic experiences.  She was born and brought up in a bleak moorland village, climbing steeply and grimly to the edge of heathery uplands.  The bare parsonage, with its little dark rooms, looks out on a churchyard paved with graves.  Her father was a kindly man, but essentially moody and solitary.  He took all his meals alone, walked alone, sate alone.  Her mother died of cancer, when she was but a child.  Then she was sent to an ill-managed austere school, and here when she was nine years old her two elder sisters died.  She took service two or three times as a governess, and endured agonies of misunderstanding, suspicious of her employers, afraid of her pupils, longing for home with an intense yearning.  Then she went out to a school at Brussels, where under the teaching of M. Heger, a gifted professor, her mind and heart awoke, and she formed for him a strange affection, half an intellectual devotion, half an unconscious passion, which deprived her of her peace of mind.  Her sad and wistful letters to him, lately published, were disregarded by him, partly because his wife was undoubtedly jealous of the relation,