istory; the
turning-point, which modified, in the most important and by no means
wholly in the most favorable manner, all the subsequent stages of it.

Old Radicalism and mutinous audacious Ethnicism having thus fallen
to wreck, and a mere black world of misery and remorse now disclosing
itself, whatsoever of natural piety to God and man, whatsoever of pity
and reverence, of awe and devout hope was in Sterling's heart now awoke
into new activity; and strove for some due utterance and predominance.
His Letters, in these months, speak of earnest religious studies and
efforts;--of attempts by prayer and longing endeavor of all kinds, to
struggle his way into the temple, if temple there were, and there find
sanctuary. [10] The realities were grown so haggard; life a field of
black ashes, if there rose no temple anywhere on it! Why, like a fated
Orestes, is man so whipt by the Furies, and driven madly hither and
thither, if it is not even that he may seek some shrine, and there make
expiation and find deliverance?

In these circumstances, what a scope for Coleridge's philosophy, above
all! "If the bottled moonshine _be_ actually substance? Ah, could one
but believe in a Church while finding it incredible! What is faith; what
is conviction, credibility, insight? Can a thing be at once known for
true, and known for false? 'Reason,' 'Understanding:' is there, then,
such an internecine war between these two? It was so Coleridge
imagined it, the wisest of existing men!"--No, it is not an easy matter
(according to Sir Kenelm Digby), this of getting up your "astral spirit"
of a thing, and setting it in action, when the thing itself is well
burnt to ashes. Poor Sterling; poor sons of Adam in general, in this sad
age of cobwebs, worn-out symbolisms, reminiscences and simulacra! Who
can tell the struggles of poor Sterling, and his pathless wanderings
through these things! Long afterwards, in speech with his Brother,
he compared his case in this time to that of "a young lady who has
tragically lost her lover, and is willing to be half-hoodwinked into a
convent, or in any noble or quasi-noble way to escape from a world which
has become intolerable."

During the summer of 1832, I find traces of attempts towards
Anti-Slavery Philanthropy; shadows of extensive schemes in that
direction. Half-desperate outlooks, it is likely, towards the refuge of
Philanthropism, as a new chivalry of life. These took no serious hold
of so clear an in