tellect; but they hovered now and afterwards as
day-dreams, when life otherwise was shorn of aim;--mirages in the
desert, which are found not to be lakes when you put your bucket into
them. One thing was clear, the sojourn in St. Vincent was not to last
much longer.

Perhaps one might get some scheme raised into life, in Downing Street,
for universal Education to the Blacks, preparatory to emancipating
them? There were a noble work for a man! Then again poor Mrs. Sterling's
health, contrary to his own, did not agree with warm moist climates.
And again, &c. &c. These were the outer surfaces of the measure; the
unconscious pretexts under which it showed itself to Sterling and
was shown by him: but the inner heart and determining cause of it (as
frequently in Sterling's life, and in all our lives) was not these. In
brief, he had had enough of St. Vincent. The strangling oppressions of
his soul were too heavy for him there. Solution lay in Europe, or might
lie; not in these remote solitudes of the sea,--where no shrine or
saint's well is to be looked for, no communing of pious pilgrims
journeying together towards a shrine.

CHAPTER XV. BONN; HERSTMONCEUX.

After a residence of perhaps fifteen months Sterling quitted St.
Vincent, and never returned. He reappeared at his Father's house, to the
joy of English friends, in August, 1832; well improved in health, and
eager for English news; but, beyond vague schemes and possibilities,
considerably uncertain what was next to be done.

After no long stay in this scene,--finding Downing Street dead as stone
to the Slave-Education and to all other schemes,--he went across, with
his wife and child, to Germany; purposing to make not so much a tour
as some loose ramble, or desultory residence in that country, in the
Rhineland first of all. Here was to be hoped the picturesque in scenery,
which he much affected; here the new and true in speculation, which
he inwardly longed for and wanted greatly more; at all events, here as
readily as elsewhere might a temporary household be struck up, under
interesting circumstances.--I conclude he went across in the Spring
of 1833; perhaps directly after _Arthur Coningsby_ had got through the
press. This Novel, which, as we have said, was begun two or three years
ago, probably on his cessation from the _Athenaeum_, and was mainly
finished, I think, before the removal to St. Vincent, had by this time
fallen as good as obsolete to his own mind; a