The private journal of Mr. Faber's journey abounds with evidences of the deep impressions which Catholic customs made upon him, and his secret dissatisfaction with his own cold church--a dissatisfaction of which probably he was still himself unconscious. He is at Genoa on the Feast of the Annunciation, "and not to be utterly without sympathy with the Genoese around us, we decorated our room with a bunch of crimson tulips, apparently the favorite flower, that we might not be without somewhat to remind us of her 'Who so above All mothers shone; The Mother of The Blessed One.'" In Constantinople he is impressed with the folly of patching up the Anglican succession by an alliance with the Greek Church. "Depend upon it," he writes, "cast about as we will, if we want foreign Catholic sympathies, we must find them as they will let us in our Latin mother." He witnesses a procession of pilgrims from Vienna to the shrine of the Blessed Virgin at Mariazell. "It was a bewildering sight. I thought how faith ran in my own country in thin and scattered rivulets, and I looked with envious surprise at this huge wave which the Austrian capital had flung upon this green platform of Styrian highland--a wave of pure, hearty, earnest faith." He is indignant at the desecration of Sunday by the Lutheran population of Dresden, and exclaims, "Yet year after year are we assured in England of the connection between popery and whatever is disagreeable in the foreign way of keeping Sunday. No person who has not been abroad, and heard and seen and investigated for himself, would credit the extensive system of lying pursued by English travel-writers, religious-tract compilers, and Exeter Hall speech-makers, respecting the Roman Church abroad; and whether the lies be those of wilfulness or of prejudice, ignorance, and indolence, I do not see much to distinguish in the guilt. These dirt-seekers scrape the sewers of Europe to rough-cast the Church of Rome with the plentiful defilements." Soon after his return home, he was offered the college living of Elton, in Huntingdonshire, and at first declined it, but afterward, for a reason which curiously illustrates his conscientiousness, he determined to accept. "My chief rock of offence," said he, "is the subduing the poet to the priest." He would have given up poetry altogether, but Keble convinced him that he had no right to bury his chief talent in a napkin. To cultivate it in moderation was more difficult, and here he thought the uncongenial duties of the pastoral office would be a great help in correcting his inordinate love of literature, and keeping him within the bounds of usefulness. "I do not say you are wrong," was Wordsworth's remark on hearing his determination; "but England loses a poet."