overburdened heart; but he was always the spoiled and indulged
child of his boyhood, infinitely winning, provoking, wilful. He
could not be helped, because he could never get away from himself;
he could admire almost frenziedly, but he could not worship; he
could not keep himself from criticism even when he adored, and he
had a bitter superiority of spirit, a terrible perception of the
imperfections and faults of others, a real despair of humanity.

I do not know exactly what the terrors which Ruskin suffered were--
very few people will tell the tale of the valley of hobgoblins, or
probably cannot! In the Pilgrim's Progress itself, the unreality of
the spirits of fear, their secrecy and leniency, is very firmly and
wittily told. They scream in their dens, sitting together, I have
thought, like fowls in a roost. They come padding after the
pilgrim, they show themselves obscurely, swollen by the mist at the
corners of the road. They give the sense of being banded together
in a numerous ambush, they can deceive eye and ear, and even nose
with noisome stenches; but they cannot show themselves, and they
cannot hurt. If they could be seen, they would be nothing but limp
ungainly things that would rouse disdain and laughter and even
pity, at anything at once so weak and so malevolent. But they are
not like the demons of sin that can hamper and wound; they are just
little gnomes and elves that can make a noise, and their strength
is a spiteful and a puny thing.

Ruskin had no sordid or material fears; he had no fear of poverty,
for he flung his father's hard-earned wealth profusely away; nor
did he fear illness; indeed one of the bravest and most gallant
things about him was the way in which he talked and wrote about his
insane fits, described his haunted visions, told, half-ruefully,