I feel no real doubt of this, because Carlyle's passion for accurate and minute knowledge, his intense interest in temperament and character, his almost unequalled power of observation--which is really the surest sign of genius--come out so clearly all through his life, that his finite limitations must have been of the nature of a torture to him. One who desired to know the truth about everything so vehemently, was crushed and bewildered by the narrow 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.