A celebrated author and divine has written to me that he has gradually learned to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that he created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that he required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of his laws.

As far as I can make out that comment was penned by Charles Kingsley in a letter to Darwin, not by Darwin himself. My copy of Origin is of the first edition and there is no such entry on page 422. I think you'll find that Darwin was always driven by evidence, not evidence-innocent conjecture. He made some references to creation in his second edition, largely to deflect criticism from those of a religious bent. There is simply no need to consider that a creator kick-started life/evolution. There is certainly no evidence for it, though we always have that elephant in the room, The God Of The Gaps, for company.