s, and telling them at the
same time with a sigh, you are going to leave them--Oh, happy
modification of matter! they will remain insensible to thy loss.
But how wilt thou be able to part with thy garden? the recollection
of so many pleasant walks must have endeared it to you. The trees,
the shrubs, the flowers, which thou reared with thy own hands, will
they not droop, and fade away sooner upon thy departure? Who will
be thy successor to raise them in thy absence? Thou wilt leave thy
name upon the myrtle tree--If trees, shrubs, and flowers could
compose an elegy, I should expect a very plaintive one on this
subject."

In the course of one of his sermons he writes very characteristically--

"Let the torpid monk seek heaven comfortless and alone, God speed
him! For my own part, I fear I should never so find the way; let me
be wise and religious, but let me be man; wherever Thy Providence
places me, or whatever be the road I take to get to Thee, give me
some companion in my journey, be it only to remark to. 'How our
shadows lengthen as the sun goes down,' to whom I may say, 'How
fresh is the face of nature! How sweet the flowers of the field!
How delicious are these fruits!'"

We believe these to have been sincere expressions--inside his motley
garb he had a heart of tenderness. It went forth to all, even to the
animal world--to the caged starling. Some may attribute the ebullitions
of feeling in his works to affectation, but those who have read them
attentively will observe the same impulses too generally predominant to
be the work of design. The story of the prisoner Le Fevre and of Maria
bear the brightest testimony to his character in this respect. What
sentiments can surpass in poetic beauty or religious feeling that in
which he commends the distraught girl to the beneficence of the Almighty
who "tempers the wind to the shorn lamb."

We have no proof that Sterne was a dissipated man. He expressly denies
it in a letter written shortly before his death, and in another, he
says, "The world has imagined because I wrote 'Tristram Shandy,' that I
myself was more Shandean than I really was." In his day many, not only
of the laity, but of the clergy, thought little of indulging in coarse
jests, and of writing poetry which contained much more wit than decency.
Sterne having lived in retirement until 1759, must have had a feeble
const