at Bonn; that he now
longed to enter the Church straightway: that if the Herstmonceux Curacy
was still vacant, and the Rector's kind thought towards him still held,
he would instantly endeavor to qualify himself for that office.

Answer being in the affirmative on both heads, Sterling returned to
England; took orders,--"ordained deacon at Chichester on Trinity Sunday
in 1834" (he never became technically priest):--and so, having fitted
himself and family with a reasonable house, in one of those leafy lanes
in quiet Herstmonceux, on the edge of Pevensey Level, he commenced the
duties of his Curacy.

The bereaved young lady has _taken_ the veil, then! Even so. "Life is
growing all so dark and brutal; must be redeemed into human, if it will
continue life. Some pious heroism, to give a human color to life again,
on any terms,"--even on impossible ones!

To such length can transcendental moonshine, cast by some morbidly
radiating Coleridge into the chaos of a fermenting life, act magically
there, and produce divulsions and convulsions and diseased developments.
So dark and abstruse, without lamp or authentic finger-post, is the
course of pious genius towards the Eternal Kingdoms grown. No fixed
highway more; the old spiritual highways and recognized paths to the
Eternal, now all torn up and flung in heaps, submerged in unutterable
boiling mud-oceans of Hypocrisy and Unbelievability, of brutal living
Atheism and damnable dead putrescent Cant: surely a tragic pilgrimage
for all mortals; Darkness, and the mere shadow of Death, enveloping all
things from pole to pole; and in the raging gulf-currents, offering us
will-o'-wisps for loadstars,--intimating that there are no stars, nor
ever were, except certain Old-Jew ones which have now gone out. Once
more, a tragic pilgrimage for all mortals; and for the young pious soul,
winged with genius, and passionately seeking land, and passionately
abhorrent of floating carrion withal, more tragical than for any!--A
pilgrimage we must all undertake nevertheless, and make the best of
with our respective means. Some arrive; a glorious few: many must be
lost,--go down upon the floating wreck which they took for land. Nay,
courage! These also, so far as there was any heroism in them, have
bequeathed their life as a contribution to us, have valiantly laid their
bodies in the chasm for us: of these also there is no ray of heroism
_lost_,--and, on the whole, what else of them could or should b