At length deciding for the milder alternative, he had thrown in some completing touches here and there,--especially, as I conjecture, a proportion of Coleridgean moonshine at the end; and so sent it forth.
It was in the sunny days, perhaps in May or June of this year, that _Arthur Coningsby_ reached my own hand, far off amid the heathy wildernesses; sent by John Mill: and I can still recollect the pleasant little episode it made in my solitude there.

The general impression it left on me, which has never since been renewed by a second reading in whole or in part, was the certain prefigurement to myself, more or less distinct, of an opulent, genial and sunny mind, but misdirected, disappointed, experienced in misery;--nay crude and hasty; mistaking for a solid outcome from its woes what was only to me a gilded vacuity.

The hero an ardent youth, representing Sterling himself, plunges into life such as we now have it in these anarchic times, with the radical, utilitarian, or mutinous heathen theory, which is the readiest for inquiring souls; finds, by various courses of adventure, utter shipwreck in this; lies broken, very wretched: that is the tragic nodus, or apogee of his life-course.

In this mood of mind, he clutches desperately towards some new method (recognizable as Coleridge's) of laying hand again on the old Church, which has hitherto been extraneous and as if non-extant to his way of thought; makes out, by some Coleridgean legedermain, that there actually is still a Church for him; that this extant Church, which he long took for an extinct shadow, is not such, but a substance; upon which he can anchor himself amid the storms of fate;--and he does so, even taking orders in it, I think.

Such could by no means seem to me the true or tenable solution.