128 PRÆTERITA-I

greater than I should myself have been capable of, I know, and I believe that it was unwise. For during these years of waiting, my father fell gradually into a state of ill-health, from which he never entirely recovered; and in close of life, they both had to leave their child, just when he was beginning to satisfy the hopes they had formed for him.

148. I have allowed this tale of the little I knew of their early trials and virtues to be thus chance told, because I think my history will, in the end, be completest if I write as its connected subjects occur to me, and not with formal chronology of plan. My reason for telling it in this place was chiefly to explain how my mother obtained her perfect skill in English reading, through the hard effort which, through the years of waiting, she made to efface the faults, and supply the defects, of her early education; effort which was aided and directed unerringly by her natural-for its intensity I might justly call it supernatural -purity of heart and conduct, leading her always to take most delight in the right and clear language which only can relate lovely things. Her unquestioning evangelical faith in the literal truth of the Bible placed me, as soon as I could conceive or think, in the presence of an unseen world; and set my active analytic power early to work on the questions of conscience, free will, and responsibility,¹ which are easily determined in days of innocence; but are approached too often with prejudice, and always with disadvantage, after men become stupefied by the opinions, or tainted by the sins, of the outer world: while the gloom, and even terror, with which the restrictions of the Sunday, and the doctrines of the Pilgrim’s Progress, the Holy War, and Quarles’s Emblems, oppressed the seventh part of my time, was useful to me as the only form of vexation which I was called on to endure; and redeemed by the otherwise uninterrupted cheerfulness and tranquillity of a

¹ [Questions early resolved for him, Ruskin says elsewhere, by his childish experiences: see Fors Clavigera, Letter 37 (Vol. XXVIII. p. 15).]

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