You may fancy whether my life is a very happy one thus spent without even the satisfaction of the sense of right-doing.  I must come to some resolution about it, and that shortly.  I was talking seriously with Fanning the other night about the possibility of finding some employment of a profitable kind in Australia, storekeeping, squatting, or the like.  As I told him, any change in my mode of life must be total.  If I am to change at all, the change must be total and complete.  I will not attempt my own profession.  I should only be led astray to think and to work as of old, and sigh continually for my old dear and intoxicating pursuits.  I wish I understood Brewing, and I would make a proposition to come and help your father.  You may smile, but I am as serious as ever I was in my life.

[The distance between them made it doubly difficult to keep in touch with one another, when the post took from four and a half to five or even six months to reach England from Australia.  The answer to a letter would come when the matter in question was long done with.  The assurance that he was doing right at one moment seemed inadequate when circumstances had altered and hope sunk lower.  It was all too easy to suspect that she did not understand his aims, his thirst for action, nor the fact that he was no longer free to do as he liked, whether to stay in the navy, to go into practice, or follow his own pursuits and pleasure.  Yet it made him despair to be so hedged in by circumstances.  With all his efforts, he seemed as though he had done nothing but earn the reputation of being a very promising young man.  How much easier to continue the struggle if he could but have seen her face to face, and read her thoughts as to whether he were right or wrong in the course he was pursuing.  He appeals to her faith that he is choosing the nobler path in pursuing knowledge, than in turning aside to the temptation of throwing it up for the sake of their speedier union.  Still she was right in claiming a share in his work; but for her his life would have been wasted.

The clouds gathered very thickly about him when in April 1852 his mother died, while his father was hopelessly ill.] “Belief and happiness,” [he writes,] “seem to be beyond the reach of thinking men in these days, but courage and silence are left.” [Again the clouds lifted, for in October he received Miss Heathorn’s] “noble and self-sacrificing letter, which has given me more comfort than anything for a long while,” [the keynote of which was that a man should pursue those things for which he is most fitted, let them be what they will.  He now felt free to tell the vicissitudes of thought and will he had passed through this twelvemonth, and how the idea of giving up all had affected him.] “The spectre of a wasted life has passed before me—­a vision of that servant who hid his talent in a napkin and buried it.”

[Early in 1853 he writes how much he was cheered by his sister’s advice and encouragement to persist in the struggle; but the darkest moment was still to come.  His hopes from his candidature crumbled away one after the other; his leave from the Admiralty was coming to an end, and there was small hope of renewing it; the grant from Government remained as unattainable as ever; the long struggle had taught him the full extent of his powers only, it seemed, to end by denying him all opportunity for their use.]