e a
choke-vault, deadly to soul and to body, if he enter. Sceptre, crosier,
sheep-crook is none there for him.

There remains one other implement, the resource of all Adam's posterity
that are otherwise foiled,--the Pen. It was evident from this point that
Sterling, however otherwise beaten about, and set fluctuating, would
gravitate steadily with all his real weight towards Literature. That he
would gradually try with consciousness to get into Literature; and, on
the whole, never quit Literature, which was now all the world for him.
Such is accordingly the sum of his history henceforth: such small sum,
so terribly obstructed and diminished by circumstances, is all we have
realized from him.

Sterling had by no means as yet consciously quitted the clerical
profession, far less the Church as a creed. We have seen, he
occasionally officiated still in these months, when a friend requested
or an opportunity invited. Nay it turned out afterwards, he had, unknown
even to his own family, during a good many weeks in the coldest period
of next spring, when it was really dangerous for his health and did
prove hurtful to it,--been constantly performing the morning service
in some Chapel in Bayswater for a young clerical neighbor, a slight
acquaintance of his, who was sickly at the time. So far as I know, this
of the Bayswater Chapel in the spring of 1836, a feat severely rebuked
by his Doctor withal, was his last actual service as a churchman. But
the conscious life ecclesiastical still hung visibly about his inner
unconscious and real life, for years to come; and not till by slow
degrees he had unwinded from him the wrappages of it, could he become
clear about himself, and so much as try heartily what his now sole
course was. Alas, and he had to live all the rest of his days, as in
continual flight for his very existence; "ducking under like a poor
unfledged partridge-bird," as one described it, "before the mower;
darting continually from nook to nook, and there crouching, to escape
the scythe of Death." For Literature Proper there was but little left
in such a life. Only the smallest broken fractions of his last and
heaviest-laden years can poor Sterling be said to have completely lived.
His purpose had risen before him slowly in noble clearness; clear at
last,--and even then the inevitable hour was at hand.

In those first London months, as always afterwards while it remained
physically possible, I saw much of him; loved h