cally, How a
noble life is to be led in it? you will be luckier than Sterling or I if
you get any credible answer, or find any made road whatever. Alas, it is
even so. Your heart's question, if it be of that sort, most things and
persons will answer with a "Nonsense! Noble life is in Drury Lane,
and wears yellow boots. You fool, compose yourself to your
pudding!"--Surely, in these times, if ever in any, the young heroic soul
entering on life, so opulent, full of sunny hope, of noble valor and
divine intention, is tragical as well as beautiful to us.

Of the three learned Professions none offered any likelihood for
Sterling. From the Church his notions of the "black dragoon," had there
been no other obstacle, were sufficient to exclude him. Law he had just
renounced, his own Radical philosophies disheartening him, in face of
the ponderous impediments, continual up-hill struggles and formidable
toils inherent in such a pursuit: with Medicine he had never been in
any contiguity, that he should dream of it as a course for him. Clearly
enough the professions were unsuitable; they to him, he to them.
Professions, built so largely on speciosity instead of performance;
clogged, in this bad epoch, and defaced under such suspicions of fatal
imposture, were hateful not lovable to the young radical soul, scornful
of gross profit, and intent on ideals and human noblenesses. Again, the
professions, were they never so perfect and veracious, will require slow
steady pulling, to which this individual young radical, with his swift,
far-darting brilliancies, and nomadic desultory ways, is of all men the
most averse and unfitted. No profession could, in any case, have well
gained the early love of Sterling. And perhaps withal the most tragic
element of his life is even this, That there now was none to which
he could fitly, by those wiser than himself, have been bound and
constrained, that he might learn to love it. So swift, light-limbed and
fiery an Arab courser ought, for all manner of reasons, to have
been trained to saddle and harness. Roaming at full gallop over the
heaths,--especially when your heath was London, and English and
European life, in the nineteenth century,--he suffered much, and did
comparatively little. I have known few creatures whom it was more
wasteful to send forth with the bridle thrown up, and to set to
steeple-hunting instead of running on highways! But it is the lot of
many such, in this dislocated time,--Heaven