JOHN RUSKIN'S JUVENILIA HAS ALWAYS BEEN ADMIRED FOR ITS FACILITY. AS a child he could compose dozens of lines in a day, and fair-copy the draft with minimal revision. In his family, this effortlessness was termed the heart's ease of composition. Years later, this quality was still employed by Ruskin as a criterion in literary criticism, a writer's ease indicating a felicitous imagination that, in Ruskin's view, must have been trained in a joyfully obedient childhood. With this criticism tending to biography--Scott's life is exemplary--ease of invention is attributed to a coherent self, the self and the work having been established together and without revision, as if great artists could suffer no false starts, only unhappy endings. A complete survey of the early manuscripts supports the reputation of Ruskin's juvenilia for its heart's ease, but only in part. The manuscripts also reveal heavily revised and fragmented writing. Fragments, however, were expurgated by the editors of the juvenilia, thereby perpetuating the myth of Ruskin's heart's ease, at the expense of a different story indicated by the signs of textual difficulty. These indications can be related to psychological disturbance, which had its source in an enmeshment of narcissistic bonds in the Ruskin family. This web, destructive and inescapable, threatened the boy's self-esteem and coherence, and the resulting fragmentation of self was manifested in incomplete and heavily revised verse. The often starkly contrasting indications of facility and difficulty of composition in the manuscripts tend to be identified with competing forms of romantic quest. In the fragmentary verse suppressed by Ruskin's editors, the boy borrows tropes from Byron that he uses to probe his ambivalent attachment to his mother. Margaret Ruskin is an ocean's breast in Byron's marine imagery. The young poet yearns to drown in this breast, yet he also contemptuously spurns and attacks the attachment. When these explorations prove too disturbing, Ruskin breaks off the draft and seeks to recover heart's ease. Relief is found by exchanging Byronic voyages for Wordsworthian excursions. This new verse, set in mountain country, is untroubled by revision, for Ruskin has abandoned the exploration of his ambivalent feelings about his mother and instead writes with greater assurance about his companionship with his father. The recovery of heart's ease depends on the support of a companionable, male alter ego. With his early writing formed on these contrasting modes of romantic quest and their attendant conditions of self, Ruskin continued to dwell on those oppositions in his mature evaluations of romanticism. In his later, shifting assessments of Byron and Shelley, Wordsworth and Scott, Ruskin persisted in a concern with the romantics' relative ease of composition. According to Fors Clavigera and Fiction, Fair and Foul of the 1870s and 1880s, in which Ruskin reviews the romantics for the last time, a writer's facility, or lack thereof, serves as an index of his reception by modern urban audiences, who can drive a writer to distraction with mercilessly demanded brain-toil.(1) The frenzied toil of the modern literary market is contrasted with Ruskin's childhood lessons, in which his mother is represented as strictly disciplining his reading, handwriting, pronunciation, and prosody. Ruskin means to pose the child's obedience, restraint, and self-sacrifice as an admonishment against the turbulence of contemporary market values. Modern audiences have lost the capacity for obedience and discipline, and, consequently, with the decline of authority and the rise of the popular market, intrinsic aesthetic value has been replaced by market exchange value. The result, in Ruskin's examples from romantic literature, is that the writer either succumbs to these market forces, as Scott did, or stands apart and criticizes them, as Byron did. In either case, no heart's ease of writing is possible. …