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.] And so the card house I have been so laboriously building up these two years with all manner of hard struggling will be tumbled down again, and my small light will be ignominiously snuffed out like that of better men...I can submit if the fates are too strong. The world is no better than an arena of gladiators, and I, a stray savage, have been turned into it to fight my way with my rude club among the steel-clad fighters. Well, I have won my way into the front rank, and ought to be thankful and deem it only the natural order of things if I can get no further. [And again in a letter of July 6, 1853:--]