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.