"Life is growing all so dark and brutal; must be redeemed into human, if it will continue life.

Some pious heroism, to give a human color to life again, on any terms,"-- even on impossible ones! To such length can transcendental moonshine, cast by some morbidly radiating Coleridge into the chaos of a fermenting life, act magically there, and produce divulsions and convulsions and diseased developments.
So dark and abstruse, without lamp or authentic finger-post, is the course of pious genius towards the Eternal Kingdoms grown.

No fixed highway more; the old spiritual highways and recognized paths to the Eternal, now all torn up and flung in heaps, submerged in unutterable boiling mud-oceans of Hypocrisy and Unbelievability, of brutal living Atheism and damnable dead putrescent Cant: surely a tragic pilgrimage for all mortals; Darkness, and the mere shadow of Death, enveloping all things from pole to pole; and in the raging gulf-currents, offering us will-o'-wisps for loadstars,--intimating that there are no stars, nor ever were, except certain Old-Jew ones which have now gone out.

Once more, a tragic pilgrimage for all mortals; and for the young pious soul, winged with genius, and passionately seeking land, and passionately abhorrent of floating carrion withal, more tragical than for any!--A pilgrimage we must all undertake nevertheless, and make the best of with our respective means.

Some arrive; a glorious few: many must be lost,--go down upon the floating wreck which they took for land.