ABSTRACT
Rosa Carey manages to balance the necessity for a home on earth, in both its physical and its spiritual manifestations, with the scriptural assertion that life is a pilgrimage and that death could come at any time. Carey also appears to subvert the austerity of the established religion by filling out more orthodox pieties with allusions to the early work of William Wordsworth. This entails another range of sentimental heresies though these do not, in themselves, have even the semblance of biblical authority. However, Carey's recourse to sentimental heresy seems to indicate more than a desire to comfort the bereaved who might find the religion of the Book insufficient in it. In spite of her sentimental heresies, the establishment religion was never seriously undermined. Rather, compensatory strategies of an unorthodox kind were brought to the aid of orthodoxy.
