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Life of John Sterling

by Thomas Carlyle · English · Gutenberg #1085 · 535,479 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Life of John Sterling


Author: Thomas Carlyle

Release date: October 1, 1997 [eBook #1085]
                Most recently updated: August 5, 2008

Language: English



*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIFE OF JOHN STERLING ***



Produced by Ron Burkey





LIFE OF JOHN STERLING

By Thomas Carlyle


Transcriber's Note: Italics in the text are indicated by the use of an
underscore as delimiter, _thusly_. All footnotes have been collected at
the end of the text, and numbered sequentially in brackets, [thusly].
One illustration has been omitted. The "pound" symbol has been replaced
by the word "pounds". Otherwise, all spelling, punctuation, etc., have
been left as in the printed text.

Taken from volume 2 of Carlyle's Complete Works, which additionally
contains the Latter-Day Pamphlets, to be provided as a separate etext.




PART I.



CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY.

Near seven years ago, a short while before his death in 1844, John
Sterling committed the care of his literary Character and printed
Writings to two friends, Archdeacon Hare and myself. His estimate of the
bequest was far from overweening; to few men could the small sum-total
of his activities in this world seem more inconsiderable than, in those
last solemn days, it did to him. He had burnt much; found much unworthy;
looking steadfastly into the silent continents of Death and Eternity, a
brave man's judgments about his own sorry work in the field of Time are
not apt to be too lenient. But, in fine, here was some portion of his
work which the world had already got hold of, and which he could not
burn. This too, since it was not to be abolished and annihilated, but
must still for some time live and act, he wished to be wisely settled,
as the rest had been. And so it was left in charge to us, the survivors,
to do for it what we judged fittest, if indeed doing nothing did not
seem the fittest to us. This message, communicated after his decease,
was naturally a sacred one to Mr. Hare and me.

After some consultation on it, and survey of the difficulties and
delicate considerations involved in it, Archdeacon Hare and I agreed
that the whole task, of selecting what Writings were to be reprinted,
and of drawing up a Biography to introduce them, should be left to him
alone; and done without interference of mine:--as accordingly it was, [1]
in a manner surely far superior to the common, in every good quality of
editing; and visibly everywhere bearing testimony to the friendliness,
the piety, perspicacity and other gifts and virtues of that eminent and
amiable man.

In one respect, however, if in one only, the arrangement had been
unfortunate. Archdeacon Hare, both by natural tendency and by his
position as a Churchman, had been led, in editing a Work not free from
ecclesiastical heresies, and especially in writing a Life very full of
such, to dwell with preponderating emphasis on that part of his subject;
by no means extenuating the fact, nor yet passing lightly over it (which
a layman could have done) as needing no extenuation; but carefully
searching into it, with the view of excusing and explaining it; dwelling
on it, presenting all the documents of it, and as it were spreading it
over the whole field of his delineation; as if religious heterodoxy had
been the grand fact of Sterling's life, which even to the Archdeacon's
mind it could by no means seem to be. _Hinc illae lachrymae_. For the
Religious Newspapers, and Periodical Heresy-hunters, getting very lively
in those years, were prompt to seize the cue; and have prosecuted
and perhaps still prosecute it, in their sad way, to all lengths and
breadths. John Sterling's character and writings, which had little
business to be spoken of in any Church-court, have hereby been carried
thither as if for an exclusive trial; and the mournfulest set of
pleadings, out of which nothing but a misjudgment _can_ be formed,
prevail there ever since. The noble Sterling, a radiant child of the
empyrean, clad in bright auroral hues in the memory of all that knew
him,--what is he doing here in inquisitorial _sanbenito_, with nothing
but ghastly spectralities prowling round him, and inarticulately
screeching and gibbering what they call their judgment on him!

"The sin of Hare's Book," says one of my Correspondents in those years,
"is easily defined, and not very condemnable, but it is nevertheless
ruinous to his task as Biographer. He takes up Sterling as a clergyman
merely. Sterling, I find, was a curate for exactly eight months; during
eight months and no more had he any special relation to the Church. But
he was a man, and had relation to the Universe, for eight-and-thirty
years: and it is in this latter character, to which all the others were
but features and transitory hues, that we wish to know him. His battle
with hereditary Church formulas was severe; but it was by no means his
one battle with things inherited, nor indeed his chief battle;
neither, according to my observation of what it was, is it successfully
delineated or summed up in this Book. The truth is, nobody that had
known Sterling would recognize a feature of him here; you would never
dream that this Book treated of _him_ at all. A pale sickly shadow in
torn surplice is presented to us here; weltering bewildered amid
heaps of what you call 'Hebrew Old-clothes;' wrestling, with impotent
impetuosity, to free itself from the baleful imbroglio, as if that
had been its one function in life: who in this miserable figure would
recognize the brilliant, beautiful and cheerful John Sterling, with
his ever-flowing wealth of ideas, fancies, imaginations; with his frank
affections, inexhaustible hopes, audacities, activities, and general
radiant vivacity of heart and intelligence, which made the presence of
him an illumination and inspiration wherever he went? It is too bad.
Let a man be honestly forgotten when his life ends; but let him not be
misremembered in this way. To be hung up as an ecclesiastical scarecrow,
as a target for heterodox and orthodox to practice archery upon, is no
fate that can be due to the memory of Sterling. It was not as a ghastly
phantasm, choked in Thirty-nine-article controversies, or miserable
Semitic, Anti-Semitic street-riots,--in scepticisms, agonized
self-seekings, that this man appeared in life; nor as such, if the world
still wishes to look at him should you suffer the world's memory of him
now to be. Once for all, it is unjust; emphatically untrue as an image
of John Sterling: perhaps to few men that lived along with him could
such an interpretation of their existence be more inapplicable."


Whatever truth there might be in these rather passionate
representations, and to myself there wanted not a painful feeling of
their truth, it by no means appeared what help or remedy any friend of
Sterling's, and especially one so related to the matter as myself, could
attempt in the interim. Perhaps endure in patience till the dust
laid itself again, as all dust does if you leave it well alone? Much
obscuration would thus of its own accord fall away; and, in Mr. Hare's
narrative itself, apart from his commentary, many features of Sterling's
true character would become decipherable to such as sought them.
Censure, blame of this Work of Mr. Hare's was naturally far from my
thoughts. A work which distinguishes itself by human piety and candid
intelligence; which, in all details, is careful, lucid, exact; and which
offers, as we say, to the observant reader that will interpret facts,
many traits of Sterling besides his heterodoxy. Censure of it, from me
especially, is not the thing due; from me a far other thing is due!--

On the whole, my private thought was: First, How happy it comparatively
is, for a man of any earnestness of life, to have no Biography written
of him; but to return silently, with his small, sorely foiled bit of
work, to the Supreme Silences, who alone can judge of it or him; and not
to trouble the reviewers, and greater or lesser public, with attempting
to judge it! The idea of "fame," as they call it, posthumous or
other, does not inspire one with much ecstasy in these points of
view.--Secondly, That Sterling's performance and real or seeming
importance in this world was actually not of a kind to demand an express
Biography, even according to the world's usages. His character was not
supremely original; neither was his fate in the world wonderful. What
he did was inconsiderable enough; and as to what it lay in him to have
done, this was but a problem, now beyond possibility of settlement. Why
had a Biography been inflicted on this man; why had not No-biography,
and the privilege of all the weary, been his lot?--Thirdly, That such
lot, however, could now no longer be my good Sterling's; a tumult having
risen around his name, enough to impress some pretended likeness of him
(about as like as the Guy-Fauxes are, on Gunpowder-Day) upon the minds
of many men: so that he could not be forgotten, and could only be
misremembered, as matters now stood.

Whereupon, as practical conclusion to the whole, arose by degrees this
final thought, That, at some calmer season, when the theological dust
had well fallen, and both the matter itself, and my feelings on it, were
in a suitabler condition, I ought to give my testimony about this friend
whom I had known so well, and record clearly what my knowledge of him
was. This has ever since seemed a kind of duty I had to do in the world
before leaving it.


And so, having on my hands some leisure at this time, and being bound to
it by evident considerations, one of which ought to be especially
sacred to me, I decide to fling down on paper some outline of what
my recollections and reflections contain in reference to this most
friendly, bright and beautiful human soul; who walked with me for a
season in this world, and remains to me very memorable while I continue
in it. Gradually, if facts simple enough in themselves can be narrated
as they came to pass, it will be seen what kind of man this was; to what
extent condemnable for imaginary heresy and other crimes, to what
extent laudable and lovable for noble manful _orthodoxy_ and other
virtues;--and whether the lesson his life had to teach us is not much
the reverse of what the Religious Newspapers hitherto educe from it.

Certainly it was not as a "sceptic" that you could define him, whatever
his definition might be. Belief, not doubt, attended him at all points
of his progress; rather a tendency to too hasty and headlong belief.
Of all men he was the least prone to what you could call scepticism:
diseased self-listenings, self-questionings, impotently painful
dubitations, all this fatal nosology of spiritual maladies, so rife
in our day, was eminently foreign to him. Quite on the other side lay
Sterling's faults, such as they were. In fact, you could observe, in
spite of his sleepless intellectual vivacity, he was not properly a
thinker at all; his faculties were of the active, not of the passive or
contemplative sort. A brilliant _improvisatore_; rapid in thought, in
word and in act; everywhere the promptest and least hesitating of men.
I likened him often, in my banterings, to sheet-lightning; and
reproachfully prayed that he would concentrate himself into a bolt, and
rive the mountain-barriers for us, instead of merely playing on them and
irradiating them.

True, he had his "religion" to seek, and painfully shape together for
himself, out of the abysses of conflicting disbelief and sham-belief and
bedlam delusion, now filling the world, as all men of reflection have;
and in this respect too,--more especially as his lot in the battle
appointed for us all was, if you can understand it, victory and not
defeat,--he is an expressive emblem of his time, and an instruction and
possession to his contemporaries. For, I say, it is by no means as a
vanquished _doubter_ that he figures in the memory of those who knew
him; but rather as a victorious _believer_, and under great difficulties
a victorious doer. An example to us all, not of lamed misery, helpless
spiritual bewilderment and sprawling despair, or any kind of _drownage_
in the foul welter of our so-called religious or other controversies and
confusions; but of a swift and valiant vanquisher of all these; a noble
asserter of himself, as worker and speaker, in spite of all these.
Continually, so far as he went, he was a teacher, by act and word, of
hope, clearness, activity, veracity, and human courage and nobleness:
the preacher of a good gospel to all men, not of a bad to any man. The
man, whether in priest's cassock or other costume of men, who is the
enemy or hater of John Sterling, may assure himself that he does not yet
know him,--that miserable differences of mere costume and dialect still
divide him, whatsoever is worthy, catholic and perennial in him, from a
brother soul who, more than most in his day, was his brother and not his
adversary in regard to all that.

Nor shall the irremediable drawback that Sterling was not current in the
Newspapers, that he achieved neither what the world calls greatness nor
what intrinsically is such, altogether discourage me. What his natural
size, and natural and accidental limits were, will gradually appear, if
my sketching be successful. And I have remarked that a true delineation
of the smallest man, and his scene of pilgrimage through life, is
capable of interesting the greatest man; that all men are to an
unspeakable degree brothers, each man's life a strange emblem of every
man's; and that Human Portraits, faithfully drawn, are of all pictures
the welcomest on human walls. Monitions and moralities enough may lie
in this small Work, if honestly written and honestly read;--and, in
particular, if any image of John Sterling and his Pilgrimage through
our poor Nineteenth Century be one day wanted by the world, and they can
find some shadow of a true image here, my swift scribbling (which shall
be very swift and immediate) may prove useful by and by.



CHAPTER II. BIRTH AND PARENTAGE.

John Sterling was born at Kaimes Castle, a kind of dilapidated baronial
residence to which a small farm was then attached, rented by his Father,
in the Isle of Bute,--on the 20th July, 1806. Both his parents were
Irish by birth, Scotch by extraction; and became, as he himself did,
essentially English by long residence and habit. Of John himself
Scotland has little or nothing to claim except the birth and genealogy,
for he left it almost before the years of memory; and in his mature days
regarded it, if with a little more recognition and intelligence, yet
without more participation in any of its accents outward or inward,
than others natives of Middlesex or Surrey, where the scene of his chief
education lay.

The climate of Bute is rainy, soft of temperature; with skies of unusual
depth and brilliancy, while the weather is fair. In that soft rainy
climate, on that wild-wooded rocky coast, with its gnarled mountains and
green silent valleys, with its seething rain-storms and many-sounding
seas, was young Sterling ushered into his first schooling in this world.
I remember one little anecdote his Father told me of those first
years: One of the cows had calved; young John, still in petticoats, was
permitted to go, holding by his father's hand, and look at the newly
arrived calf; a mystery which he surveyed with open intent eyes, and the
silent exercise of all the scientific faculties he had;--very strange
mystery indeed, this new arrival, and fresh denizen of our Universe:
"Wull't eat a-body?" said John in his first practical Scotch, inquiring
into the tendencies this mystery might have to fall upon a little fellow
and consume him as provision: "Will it eat one, Father?"--Poor little
open-eyed John: the family long bantered him with this anecdote; and
we, in far other years, laughed heartily on hearing it.--Simple peasant
laborers, ploughers, house-servants, occasional fisher-people too; and
the sight of ships, and crops, and Nature's doings where Art has little
meddled with her: this was the kind of schooling our young friend had,
first of all; on this bench of the grand world-school did he sit, for
the first four years of his life.

Edward Sterling his Father, a man who subsequently came to considerable
notice in the world, was originally of Waterford in Munster; son of the
Episcopalian Clergyman there; and chief representative of a family of
some standing in those parts. Family founded, it appears, by a
Colonel Robert Sterling, called also Sir Robert Sterling; a Scottish
Gustavus-Adolphus soldier, whom the breaking out of the Civil War had
recalled from his German campaignings, and had before long, though not
till after some waverings on his part, attached firmly to the Duke
of Ormond and to the King's Party in that quarrel. A little bit of
genealogy, since it lies ready to my hand, gathered long ago out of
wider studies, and pleasantly connects things individual and present
with the dim universal crowd of things past,--may as well be inserted
here as thrown away.

This Colonel Robert designates himself Sterling "of Glorat;" I believe,
a younger branch of the well-known Stirlings of Keir in Stirlingshire.
It appears he prospered in his soldiering and other business, in
those bad Ormond times; being a man of energy, ardor and
intelligence,--probably prompt enough both with his word and with his
stroke. There survives yet, in the Commons Journals, [2] dim notice of
his controversies and adventures; especially of one controversy he had
got into with certain victorious Parliamentary official parties,
while his own party lay vanquished, during what was called the Ormond
Cessation, or Temporary Peace made by Ormond with the Parliament in
1646:--in which controversy Colonel Robert, after repeated applications,
journeyings to London, attendances upon committees, and such like, finds
himself worsted, declared to be in the wrong; and so vanishes from the
Commons Journals.

What became of him when Cromwell got to Ireland, and to Munster, I
have not heard: his knighthood, dating from the very year of Cromwell's
Invasion (1649), indicates a man expected to do his best on the
occasion:--as in all probability he did; had not Tredah Storm proved
ruinous, and the neck of this Irish War been broken at once. Doubtless
the Colonel Sir Robert followed or attended his Duke of Ormond into
foreign parts, and gave up his management of Munster, while it was yet
time: for after the Restoration we find him again, safe, and as was
natural, flourishing with new splendor; gifted, recompensed with
lands;--settled, in short, on fair revenues in those Munster regions.
He appears to have had no children; but to have left his property to
William, a younger brother who had followed him into Ireland. From this
William descends the family which, in the years we treat of, had Edward
Sterling, Father of our John, for its representative. And now enough of
genealogy.


Of Edward Sterling, Captain Edward Sterling as his title was, who in the
latter period of his life became well known in London political society,
whom indeed all England, with a curious mixture of mockery and respect
and even fear, knew well as "the Thunderer of the Times Newspaper,"
there were much to be said, did the present task and its limits permit.
As perhaps it might, on certain terms? What is indispensable let us not
omit to say. The history of a man's childhood is the description of his
parents and environment: this is his inarticulate but highly important
history, in those first times, while of articulate he has yet none.

Edward Sterling had now just entered on his thirty-fourth year; and was
already a man experienced in fortunes and changes. A native of Waterford
in Munster, as already mentioned; born in the "Deanery House of
Waterford, 27th February, 1773," say the registers. For his Father, as
we learn, resided in the Deanery House, though he was not himself Dean,
but only "Curate of the Cathedral" (whatever that may mean); he was
withal rector of two other livings, and the Dean's friend,--friend
indeed of the Dean's kinsmen the Beresfords generally; whose grand house
of Curraghmore, near by Waterford, was a familiar haunt of his and his
children's. This reverend gentleman, along with his three livings and
high acquaintanceships, had inherited political connections;--inherited
especially a Government Pension, with survivorship for still one life
beyond his own; his father having been Clerk of the Irish House of
Commons at the time of the Union, of which office the lost salary was
compensated in this way. The Pension was of two hundred pounds; and only
expired with the life of Edward, John's Father, in 1847. There were,
and still are, daughters of the family; but Edward was the only
son;--descended, too, from the Scottish hero Wallace, as the old
gentleman would sometimes admonish him; his own wife, Edward's mother,
being of that name, and boasting herself, as most Scotch Wallaces do, to
have that blood in her veins.

This Edward had picked up, at Waterford, and among the young Beresfords
of Curraghmore and elsewhere, a thoroughly Irish form of character: fire
and fervor, vitality of all kinds, in genial abundance; but in a much
more loquacious, ostentatious, much _louder_ style than is freely
patronized on this side of the Channel. Of Irish accent in speech he had
entirely divested himself, so as not to be traced by any vestige in that
respect; but his Irish accent of character, in all manner of other more
important respects, was very recognizable. An impetuous man, full
of real energy, and immensely conscious of the same; who transacted
everything not with the minimum of fuss and noise, but with the maximum:
a very Captain Whirlwind, as one was tempted to call him.

In youth, he had studied at Trinity College, Dublin; visited the Inns
of Court here, and trained himself for the Irish Bar. To the Bar he
had been duly called, and was waiting for the results,--when, in his
twenty-fifth year, the Irish Rebellion broke out; whereupon the Irish
Barristers decided to raise a corps of loyal Volunteers, and a complete
change introduced itself into Edward Sterling's way of life. For,
naturally, he had joined the array of Volunteers;--fought, I have
heard, "in three actions with the rebels" (Vinegar Hill, for one); and
doubtless fought well: but in the mess-rooms, among the young military
and civil officials, with all of whom he was a favorite, he had acquired
a taste for soldier life, and perhaps high hopes of succeeding in it: at
all events, having a commission in the Lancashire Militia offered
him, he accepted that; altogether quitted the Bar, and became Captain
Sterling thenceforth. From the Militia, it appears, he had volunteered
with his Company into the Line; and, under some disappointments, and
official delays of expected promotion, was continuing to serve as
Captain there, "Captain of the Eighth Battalion of Reserve," say the
Military Almanacs of 1803,--in which year the quarters happened to be
Derry, where new events awaited him. At a ball in Derry he met with Miss
Hester Coningham, the queen of the scene, and of the fair world in Derry
at that time. The acquaintance, in spite of some Opposition, grew with
vigor, and rapidly ripened: and "at Fehan Church, Diocese of Derry,"
where the Bride's father had a country-house, "on Thursday 5th April,
1804, Hester Coningham, only daughter of John Coningham, Esquire,
Merchant in Derry, and of Elizabeth Campbell his wife," was wedded to
Captain Sterling; she happiest to him happiest,--as by Nature's kind law
it is arranged.

Mrs. Sterling, even in her later days, had still traces of the old
beauty: then and always she was a woman of delicate, pious, affectionate
character; exemplary as a wife, a mother and a friend. A refined female
nature; something tremulous in it, timid, and with a certain rural
freshness still unweakened by long converse with the world. The tall
slim figure, always of a kind of quaker neatness; the innocent anxious
face, anxious bright hazel eyes; the timid, yet gracefully cordial
ways, the natural intelligence, instinctive sense and worth, were very
characteristic. Her voice too; with its something of soft querulousness,
easily adapting itself to a light thin-flowing style of mirth on
occasion, was characteristic: she had retained her Ulster intonations,
and was withal somewhat copious in speech. A fine tremulously sensitive
nature, strong chiefly on the side of the affections, and the graceful
insights and activities that depend on these:--truly a beautiful,
much-suffering, much-loving house-mother. From her chiefly, as one could
discern, John Sterling had derived the delicate _aroma_ of his nature,
its piety, clearness, sincerity; as from his Father, the ready practical
gifts, the impetuosities and the audacities, were also (though in
strange new form) visibly inherited. A man was lucky to have such a
Mother; to have such Parents as both his were.

Meanwhile the new Wife appears to have had, for the present, no
marriage-portion; neither was Edward Sterling rich,--according to
his own ideas and aims, far from it. Of course he soon found that
the fluctuating barrack-life, especially with no outlooks of speedy
promotion, was little suited to his new circumstances: but how change
it? His father was now dead; from whom he had inherited the Speaker
Pension of two hundred pounds; but of available probably little or
nothing more. The rents of the small family estate, I suppose, and other
property, had gone to portion sisters. Two hundred pounds, and the pay
of a marching captain: within the limits of that revenue all plans of
his had to restrict themselves at present.

He continued for some time longer in the Army; his wife undivided from
him by the hardships, of that way of life. Their first son Anthony
(Captain Anthony Sterling, the only child who now survives) was born
to them in this position, while lying at Dundalk, in January, 1805. Two
months later, some eleven months after their marriage, the regiment was
broken; and Captain Sterling, declining to serve elsewhere on the
terms offered, and willingly accepting such decision of his doubts, was
reduced to half-pay. This was the end of his soldiering: some five
or six years in all; from which he had derived for life, among other
things, a decided military bearing, whereof he was rather proud; an
incapacity for practicing law;--and considerable uncertainty as to what
his next course of life was now to be.

For the present, his views lay towards farming: to establish himself,
if not as country gentleman, which was an unattainable ambition, then
at least as some kind of gentleman-farmer which had a flattering
resemblance to that. Kaimes Castle with a reasonable extent of land,
which, in his inquiries after farms, had turned up, was his first place
of settlement in this new capacity; and here, for some few months, he
had established himself when John his second child was born. This was
Captain Sterling's first attempt towards a fixed course of life; not
a very wise one, I have understood:--yet on the whole, who, then and
there, could have pointed out to him a wiser?

A fixed course of life and activity he could never attain, or not till
very late; and this doubtless was among the important points of his
destiny, and acted both on his own character and that of those who had
to attend him on his wayfarings.



CHAPTER III. SCHOOLS: LLANBLETHIAN; PARIS; LONDON.

Edward Sterling never shone in farming; indeed I believe he never took
heartily to it, or tried it except in fits. His Bute farm was, at
best, a kind of apology for some far different ideal of a country
establishment which could not be realized; practically a temporary
landing-place from which he could make sallies and excursions in search
of some more generous field of enterprise. Stormy brief efforts at
energetic husbandry, at agricultural improvement and rapid field-labor,
alternated with sudden flights to Dublin, to London, whithersoever any
flush of bright outlook which he could denominate practical, or any
gleam of hope which his impatient ennui could represent as such,
allured him. This latter was often enough the case. In wet hay-times and
harvest-times, the dripping outdoor world, and lounging indoor one, in
the absence of the master, offered far from a satisfactory appearance!
Here was, in fact, a man much imprisoned; haunted, I doubt not, by
demons enough; though ever brisk and brave withal,--iracund, but
cheerfully vigorous, opulent in wise or unwise hope. A fiery energetic
soul consciously and unconsciously storming for deliverance into better
arenas; and this in a restless, rapid, impetuous, rather than in a
strong, silent and deliberate way.

In rainy Bute and the dilapidated Kaimes Castle, it was evident, there
lay no Goshen for such a man. The lease, originally but for some three
years and a half, drawing now to a close, he resolved to quit Bute; had
heard, I know not where, of an eligible cottage without farm attached,
in the pleasant little village of Llanblethian close by Cowbridge in
Glamorganshire; of this he took a lease, and thither with his family he
moved in search of new fortunes. Glamorganshire was at least a better
climate than Bute; no groups of idle or of busy reapers could here stand
waiting on the guidance of a master, for there was no farm here;--and
among its other and probably its chief though secret advantages,
Llanblethian was much more convenient both for Dublin and London than
Kaimes Castle had been.

The removal thither took place in the autumn of 1809. Chief part of the
journey (perhaps from Greenock to Swansea or Bristol) was by sea: John,
just turned of three years, could in after-times remember nothing of
this voyage; Anthony, some eighteen months older, has still a vivid
recollection of the gray splashing tumult, and dim sorrow, uncertainty,
regret and distress he underwent: to him a "dissolving-view" which not
only left its effect on the _plate_ (as all views and dissolving-views
doubtless do on that kind of "plate"), but remained consciously present
there. John, in the close of his twenty-first year, professes not
to remember anything whatever of Bute; his whole existence, in that
earliest scene of it, had faded away from him: Bute also, with its
shaggy mountains, moaning woods, and summer and winter seas, had been
wholly a dissolving-view for him, and had left no conscious impression,
but only, like this voyage, an effect.

Llanblethian hangs pleasantly, with its white cottages, and orchard and
other trees, on the western slope of a green hill looking far and wide
over green meadows and little or bigger hills, in the pleasant plain of
Glamorgan; a short mile to the south of Cowbridge, to which smart little
town it is properly a kind of suburb. Plain of Glamorgan, some ten
miles wide and thirty or forty long, which they call the Vale of
Glamorgan;--though properly it is not quite a Vale, there being only one
range of mountains to it, if even one: certainly the central Mountains
of Wales do gradually rise, in a miscellaneous manner, on the north
side of it; but on the south are no mountains, not even land, only
the Bristol Channel, and far off, the Hills of Devonshire, for
boundary,--the "English Hills," as the natives call them, visible from
every eminence in those parts. On such wide terms is it called Vale of
Glamorgan. But called by whatever name, it is a most pleasant fruitful
region: kind to the native, interesting to the visitor. A waving grassy
region; cut with innumerable ragged lanes; dotted with sleepy unswept
human hamlets, old ruinous castles with their ivy and their daws, gray
sleepy churches with their ditto ditto: for ivy everywhere abounds; and
generally a rank fragrant vegetation clothes all things; hanging, in
rude many-colored festoons and fringed odoriferous tapestries, on your
right and on your left, in every lane. A country kinder to the sluggard
husbandman than any I have ever seen. For it lies all on limestone,
needs no draining; the soil, everywhere of handsome depth and finest
quality, will grow good crops for you with the most imperfect tilling.
At a safe distance of a day's riding lie the tartarean copper-forges of
Swansea, the tartarean iron-forges of Merthyr; their sooty battle far
away, and not, at such safe distance, a defilement to the face of
the earth and sky, but rather an encouragement to the earth at least;
encouraging the husbandman to plough better, if he only would.

The peasantry seem indolent and stagnant, but peaceable and
well-provided; much given to Methodism when they have any
character;--for the rest, an innocent good-humored people, who all drink
home-brewed beer, and have brown loaves of the most excellent home-baked
bread. The native peasant village is not generally beautiful, though
it might be, were it swept and trimmed; it gives one rather the idea
of sluttish stagnancy,--an interesting peep into the Welsh Paradise of
Sleepy Hollow. Stones, old kettles, naves of wheels, all kinds of broken
litter, with live pigs and etceteras, lie about the street: for, as
a rule, no rubbish is removed, but waits patiently the action of mere
natural chemistry and accident; if even a house is burnt or falls, you
will find it there after half a century, only cloaked by the ever-ready
ivy. Sluggish man seems never to have struck a pick into it; his new hut
is built close by on ground not encumbered, and the old stones are still
left lying.

This is the ordinary Welsh village; but there are exceptions,
where people of more cultivated tastes have been led to settle, and
Llanblethian is one of the more signal of these. A decidedly cheerful
group of human homes, the greater part of them indeed belonging to
persons of refined habits; trimness, shady shelter, whitewash, neither
conveniency nor decoration has been neglected here. Its effect from
the distance on the eastward is very pretty: you see it like a little
sleeping cataract of white houses, with trees overshadowing and fringing
it; and there the cataract hangs, and does not rush away from you.

John Sterling spent his next five years in this locality. He did not
again see it for a quarter of a century; but retained, all his life, a
lively remembrance of it; and, just in the end of his twenty-first year,
among his earliest printed pieces, we find an elaborate and diffuse
description of it and its relations to him,--part of which piece, in
spite of its otherwise insignificant quality, may find place here:--

"The fields on which I first looked, and the sands which were marked by
my earliest footsteps, are completely lost to my memory; and of those
ancient walls among which I began to breathe, I retain no recollection
more clear than the outlines of a cloud in a moonless sky. But of L----,
the village where I afterwards lived, I persuade myself that every line
and hue is more deeply and accurately fixed than those of any spot
I have since beheld, even though borne in upon the heart by the
association of the strongest feelings.

"My home was built upon the slope of a hill, with a little orchard
stretching down before it, and a garden rising behind. At a considerable
distance beyond and beneath the orchard, a rivulet flowed through
meadows and turned a mill; while, above the garden, the summit of
the hill was crowned by a few gray rocks, from which a yew-tree grew,
solitary and bare. Extending at each side of the orchard, toward
the brook, two scattered patches of cottages lay nestled among their
gardens; and beyond this streamlet and the little mill and bridge,
another slight eminence arose, divided into green fields, tufted and
bordered with copsewood, and crested by a ruined castle, contemporary,
as was said, with the Conquest. I know not whether these things in truth
made up a prospect of much beauty. Since I was eight years old, I have
never seen them; but I well know that no landscape I have since beheld,
no picture of Claude or Salvator, gave me half the impression of living,
heartfelt, perfect beauty which fills my mind when I think of that green
valley, that sparkling rivulet, that broken fortress of dark antiquity,
and that hill with its aged yew and breezy summit, from which I have
so often looked over the broad stretch of verdure beneath it, and the
country-town, and church-tower, silent and white beyond.

"In that little town there was, and I believe is, a school where the
elements of human knowledge were communicated to me, for some hours of
every day, during a considerable time. The path to it lay across the
rivulet and past the mill; from which point we could either journey
through the fields below the old castle, and the wood which surrounded
it, or along a road at the other side of the ruin, close to the gateway
of which it passed. The former track led through two or three beautiful
fields, the sylvan domain of the keep on one hand, and the brook on the
other; while an oak or two, like giant warders advanced from the wood,
broke the sunshine of the green with a soft and graceful shadow. How
often, on my way to school, have I stopped beneath the tree to collect
the fallen acorns; how often run down to the stream to pluck a branch of
the hawthorn which hung over the water! The road which passed the castle
joined, beyond these fields, the path which traversed them. It took, I
well remember, a certain solemn and mysterious interest from the ruin.
The shadow of the archway, the discolorizations of time on all the
walls, the dimness of the little thicket which encircled it, the
traditions of its immeasurable age, made St. Quentin's Castle a
wonderful and awful fabric in the imagination of a child; and long after
I last saw its mouldering roughness, I never read of fortresses, or
heights, or spectres, or banditti, without connecting them with the one
ruin of my childhood.

"It was close to this spot that one of the few adventures occurred
which marked, in my mind, my boyish days with importance. When loitering
beyond the castle, on the way to school, with a brother somewhat older
than myself, who was uniformly my champion and protector, we espied a
round sloe high up in the hedge-row. We determined to obtain it; and
I do not remember whether both of us, or only my brother, climbed the
tree. However, when the prize was all but reached,--and no alchemist
ever looked more eagerly for the moment of projection which was to give
him immortality and omnipotence,--a gruff voice startled us with an
oath, and an order to desist; and I well recollect looking back, for
long after, with terror to the vision of an old and ill-tempered
farmer, armed with a bill-hook, and vowing our decapitation; nor did I
subsequently remember without triumph the eloquence whereby alone, in my
firm belief, my brother and myself had been rescued from instant death.

"At the entrance of the little town stood an old gateway, with a pointed
arch and decaying battlements. It gave admittance to the street which
contained the church, and which terminated in another street, the
principal one in the town of C----. In this was situated the school to
which I daily wended. I cannot now recall to mind the face of its good
conductor, nor of any of his scholars; but I have before me a strong
general image of the interior of his establishment. I remember the
reverence with which I was wont to carry to his seat a well-thumbed
duodecimo, the _History of Greece_ by Oliver Goldsmith. I remember the
mental agonies I endured in attempting to master the art and mystery of
penmanship; a craft in which, alas, I remained too short a time under
Mr. R---- to become as great a proficient as he made his other scholars,
and which my awkwardness has prevented me from attaining in any
considerable perfection under my various subsequent pedagogues. But that
which has left behind it a brilliant trait of light was the exhibition
of what are called 'Christmas pieces;' things unknown in aristocratic
seminaries, but constantly used at the comparatively humble academy
which supplied the best knowledge of reading, writing, and arithmetic to
be attained in that remote neighborhood.

"The long desks covered from end to end with those painted masterpieces,
the Life of Robinson Crusoe, the Hunting of Chevy-Chase, the History
of Jack the Giant-Killer, and all the little eager faces and trembling
hands bent over these, and filling them up with some choice quotation,
sacred or profane;--no, the galleries of art, the theatrical
exhibitions, the reviews and processions,--which are only not childish
because they are practiced and admired by men instead of children,--all
the pomps and vanities of great cities, have shown me no revelation of
glory such as did that crowded school-room the week before the Christmas
holidays. But these were the splendors of life. The truest and the
strongest feelings do not connect themselves with any scenes of gorgeous
and gaudy magnificence; they are bound up in the remembrances of home.

"The narrow orchard, with its grove of old apple-trees against one of
which I used to lean, and while I brandished a beanstalk, roar out with
Fitzjames,--

     'Come one, come all; this rock shall fly
     From its firm base as soon as I!'--

while I was ready to squall at the sight of a cur, and run valorously
away from a casually approaching cow; the field close beside it, where
I rolled about in summer among the hay; the brook in which, despite
of maid and mother, I waded by the hour; the garden where I sowed
flower-seeds, and then turned up the ground again and planted potatoes,
and then rooted out the potatoes to insert acorns and apple-pips, and
at last, as may be supposed, reaped neither roses, nor potatoes, nor
oak-trees, nor apples; the grass-plots on which I played among those
with whom I never can play nor work again: all these are places and
employments,--and, alas, playmates,--such as, if it were worth while to
weep at all, it would be worth weeping that I enjoy no longer.

"I remember the house where I first grew familiar with peacocks; and the
mill-stream into which I once fell; and the religious awe wherewith I
heard, in the warm twilight, the psalm-singing around the house of the
Methodist miller; and the door-post against which I discharged my brazen
artillery; I remember the window by which I sat while my mother taught
me French; and the patch of garden which I dug for-- But her name is
best left blank; it was indeed writ in water. These recollections are
to me like the wealth of a departed friend, a mournful treasure. But the
public has heard enough of them; to it they are worthless: they are
a coin which only circulates at its true value between the different
periods of an individual's existence, and good for nothing but to keep
up a commerce between boyhood and manhood. I have for years looked
forward to the possibility of visiting L----; but I am told that it is
a changed village; and not only has man been at work, but the old yew on
the hill has fallen, and scarcely a low stump remains of the tree which
I delighted in childhood to think might have furnished bows for the
Norman archers." [3]

In Cowbridge is some kind of free school, or grammar-school, of a
certain distinction; and this to Captain Sterling was probably a motive
for settling in the neighborhood of it with his children. Of this
however, as it turned out, there was no use made: the Sterling family,
during its continuance in those parts, did not need more than a primary
school. The worthy master who presided over these Christmas galas, and
had the honor to teach John Sterling his reading and writing, was an
elderly Mr. Reece of Cowbridge, who still (in 1851) survives, or lately
did; and is still remembered by his old pupils as a worthy, ingenious
and kindly man, "who wore drab breeches and white stockings." Beyond the
Reece sphere of tuition John Sterling did not go in this locality.

In fact the Sterling household was still fluctuating; the problem of a
task for Edward Sterling's powers, and of anchorage for his affairs in
any sense, was restlessly struggling to solve itself, but was still a
good way from being solved. Anthony, in revisiting these scenes with
John in 1839, mentions going to the spot "where we used to stand with
our Father, looking out for the arrival of the London mail:" a little
chink through which is disclosed to us a big restless section of a human
life. The Hill of Welsh Llanblethian, then, is like the mythic Caucasus
in its degree (as indeed all hills and habitations where men sojourn
are); and here too, on a small scale, is a Prometheus Chained! Edward
Sterling, I can well understand, was a man to tug at the chains that
held him idle in those the prime of his years; and to ask restlessly,
yet not in anger and remorse, so much as in hope, locomotive
speculation, and ever-new adventure and attempt, Is there no task nearer
my own natural size, then? So he looks out from the Hill-side "for
the arrival of the London mail;" thence hurries into Cowbridge to the
Post-office; and has a wide web, of threads and gossamers, upon his
loom, and many shuttles flying, in this world.

By the Marquis of Bute's appointment he had, very shortly after his
arrival in that region, become Adjutant of the Glamorganshire Militia,
"Local Militia," I suppose; and was, in this way, turning his military
capabilities to some use. The office involved pretty frequent absences,
in Cardiff and elsewhere. This doubtless was a welcome outlet, though
a small one. He had also begun to try writing, especially on public
subjects; a much more copious outlet,--which indeed, gradually widening
itself, became the final solution for him. Of the year 1811 we have a
Pamphlet of his, entitled _Military Reform_; this is the second edition,
"dedicated to the Duke of Kent;" the first appears to have come out the
year before, and had thus attained a certain notice, which of course was
encouraging. He now furthermore opened a correspondence with the _Times_
Newspaper; wrote to it, in 1812, a series of Letters under the signature
_Vetus_: voluntary Letters I suppose, without payment or pre-engagement,
one successful Letter calling out another; till _Vetus_ and his
doctrines came to be a distinguishable entity, and the business amounted
to something. Out of my own earliest Newspaper reading, I can remember
the name _Vetus_, as a kind of editorial hacklog on which able-editors
were wont to chop straw now and then. Nay the Letters were collected and
reprinted; both this first series, of 1812, and then a second of next
year: two very thin, very dim-colored cheap octavos; stray copies of
which still exist, and may one day become distillable into a drop of
History (should such be wanted of our poor "Scavenger Age" in
time coming), though the reading of them has long ceased in this
generation.[4] The first series, we perceive, had even gone to a second
edition. The tone, wherever one timidly glances into this extinct
cockpit, is trenchant and emphatic: the name of _Vetus_, strenuously
fighting there, had become considerable in the talking political world;
and, no doubt, was especially of mark, as that of a writer who might
otherwise be important, with the proprietors of the _Times_. The
connection continued: widened and deepened itself,--in a slow tentative
manner; passing naturally from voluntary into remunerated: and indeed
proving more and more to be the true ultimate arena, and battle-field
and seed-field, for the exuberant impetuosities and faculties of this
man.

What the _Letters of Vetus_ treated of I do not know; doubtless they ran
upon Napoleon, Catholic Emancipation, true methods of national defence,
of effective foreign Anti-gallicism, and of domestic ditto; which
formed the staple of editorial speculation at that time. I have heard
in general that Captain Sterling, then and afterwards, advocated "the
Marquis of Wellesley's policy;" but that also, what it was, I have
forgotten, and the world has been willing to forget. Enough, the heads
of the _Times_ establishment, perhaps already the Marquis of Wellesley
and other important persons, had their eye on this writer; and it began
to be surmised by him that here at last was the career he had been
seeking.


Accordingly, in 1814, when victorious Peace unexpectedly arrived; and
the gates of the Continent after five-and-twenty years of fierce closure
were suddenly thrown open; and the hearts of all English and European
men awoke staggering as if from a nightmare suddenly removed, and ran
hither and thither,--Edward Sterling also determined on a new adventure,
that of crossing to Paris, and trying what might lie in store for him.
For curiosity, in its idler sense, there was evidently pabulum enough.
But he had hopes moreover of learning much that might perhaps avail him
afterwards;--hopes withal, I have understood, of getting to be Foreign
Correspondent of the _Times_ Newspaper, and so adding to his income in
the mean while. He left Llanblethian in May; dates from Dieppe the 27th
of that month. He lived in occasional contact with Parisian notabilities
(all of them except Madame de Stael forgotten now), all summer,
diligently surveying his ground;--returned for his family, who were
still in Wales but ready to move, in the beginning of August; took them
immediately across with him; a house in the neighborhood of Paris, in
the pleasant village of Passy at once town and country, being now ready;
and so, under foreign skies, again set up his household there.

Here was a strange new "school" for our friend John now in his eighth
year! Out of which the little Anthony and he drank doubtless at all
pores, vigorously as they had done in no school before. A change total
and immediate. Somniferous green Llanblethian has suddenly been blotted
out; presto, here are wakeful Passy and the noises of paved Paris
instead. Innocent ingenious Mr. Reece in drab breeches and white
stockings, he with his mild Christmas galas and peaceable rules of
Dilworth and Butterworth, has given place to such a saturnalia of
panoramic, symbolic and other teachers and monitors, addressing all the
five senses at once. Who John's express tutors were, at Passy, I never
heard; nor indeed, especially in his case, was it much worth inquiring.
To him and to all of us, the expressly appointed schoolmasters and
schoolings we get are as nothing, compared with the unappointed
incidental and continual ones, whose school-hours are all the days and
nights of our existence, and whose lessons, noticed or unnoticed, stream
in upon us with every breath we draw. Anthony says they attended a
French school, though only for about three months; and he well remembers
the last scene of it, "the boys shouting _Vive l'Empereur_ when Napoleon
came back."

Of John Sterling's express schooling, perhaps the most important
feature, and by no means a favorable one to him, was the excessive
fluctuation that prevailed in it. Change of scene, change of teacher,
_both_ express and implied, was incessant with him; and gave his
young life a nomadic character,--which surely, of all the adventitious
tendencies that could have been impressed upon him, so volatile,
swift and airy a being as him, was the one he needed least. His gentle
pious-hearted Mother, ever watching over him in all outward changes, and
assiduously keeping human pieties and good affections alive in him, was
probably the best counteracting element in his lot. And on the whole,
have we not all to run our chance in that respect; and take, the most
victoriously we can, such schooling as pleases to be attainable in
our year and place? Not very victoriously, the most of us! A wise
well-calculated breeding of a young genial soul in this world, or
alas of any young soul in it, lies fatally over the horizon in these
epochs!--This French scene of things, a grand school of its sort, and
also a perpetual banquet for the young soul, naturally captivated John
Sterling; he said afterwards, "New things and experiences here were
poured upon his mind and sense, not in streams, but in a Niagara
cataract." This too, however, was but a scene; lasted only some six or
seven months; and in the spring of the next year terminated as abruptly
as any of the rest could do.

For in the spring of the next year, Napoleon abruptly emerged from
Elba; and set all the populations of the world in motion, in a strange
manner;--set the Sterling household afloat, in particular; the big
European tide rushing into all smallest creeks, at Passy and elsewhere.
In brief, on the 20th of March, 1815, the family had to shift, almost
to fly, towards home and the sea-coast; and for a day or two were under
apprehension of being detained and not reaching home. Mrs. Sterling,
with her children and effects, all in one big carriage with two horses,
made the journey to Dieppe; in perfect safety, though in continual
tremor: here they were joined by Captain Sterling, who had stayed behind
at Paris to see the actual advent of Napoleon, and to report what
the aspect of affairs was, "Downcast looks of citizens, with fierce
saturnalian acclaim of soldiery:" after which they proceeded together to
London without farther apprehension;--there to witness, in due time, the
tar-barrels of Waterloo, and other phenomena that followed.


Captain Sterling never quitted London as a residence any more; and
indeed was never absent from it, except on autumnal or other excursions
of a few weeks, till the end of his life. Nevertheless his course there
was as yet by no means clear; nor had his relations with the heads of
the _Times_, or with other high heads, assumed a form which could be
called definite, but were hanging as a cloudy maze of possibilities,
firm substance not yet divided from shadow. It continued so for some
years. The Sterling household shifted twice or thrice to new streets
or localities,--Russell Square or Queen Square, Blackfriars Road,
and longest at the Grove, Blackheath,--before the vapors of Wellesley
promotions and such like slowly sank as useless precipitate, and
the firm rock, which was definite employment, ending in lucrative
co-proprietorship and more and more important connection with the
_Times_ Newspaper, slowly disclosed itself.

These changes of place naturally brought changes in John Sterling's
schoolmasters: nor were domestic tragedies wanting, still more important
to him. New brothers and sisters had been born; two little brothers
more, three little sisters he had in all; some of whom came to their
eleventh year beside him, some passed away in their second or fourth:
but from his ninth to his sixteenth year they all died; and in 1821 only
Anthony and John were left. [5] How many tears, and passionate pangs,
and soft infinite regrets; such as are appointed to all mortals! In one
year, I find, indeed in one half-year, he lost three little playmates,
two of them within one month. His own age was not yet quite twelve. For
one of these three, for little Edward, his next younger, who died now
at the age of nine, Mr. Hare records that John copied out, in large
school-hand, a _History of Valentine and Orson_, to beguile the poor
child's sickness, which ended in death soon, leaving a sad cloud on
John.


Of his grammar and other schools, which, as I said, are hardly worth
enumerating in comparison, the most important seems to have been a Dr.
Burney's at Greenwich; a large day-school and boarding-school, where
Anthony and John gave their attendance for a year or two (1818-19) from
Blackheath. "John frequently did themes for the boys," says Anthony,
"and for myself when I was aground." His progress in all school learning
was certain to be rapid, if he even moderately took to it. A lean,
tallish, loose-made boy of twelve; strange alacrity, rapidity and joyous
eagerness looking out of his eyes, and of all his ways and movements.
I have a Picture of him at this stage; a little portrait, which carries
its verification with it. In manhood too, the chief expression of his
eyes and physiognomy was what I might call alacrity, cheerful rapidity.
You could see, here looked forth a soul which was winged; which dwelt
in hope and action, not in hesitation or fear. Anthony says, he was "an
affectionate and gallant kind of boy, adventurous and generous, daring
to a singular degree." Apt enough withal to be "petulant now and then;"
on the whole, "very self-willed;" doubtless not a little discursive in
his thoughts and ways, and "difficult to manage."

I rather think Anthony, as the steadier, more substantial boy, was
the Mother's favorite; and that John, though the quicker and cleverer,
perhaps cost her many anxieties. Among the Papers given me, is an old
browned half-sheet in stiff school hand, unpunctuated, occasionally ill
spelt,--John Sterling's earliest remaining Letter,--which gives record
of a crowning escapade of his, the first and the last of its kind; and
so may be inserted here. A very headlong adventure on the boy's part; so
hasty and so futile, at once audacious and impracticable; emblematic of
much that befell in the history of the man!

                   "_To Mrs. Sterling, Blackheath_.
                                                "21st September, 1818.

"DEAR MAMMA,--I am now at Dover, where I arrived this morning about
seven o'clock. When you thought I was going to church, I went down the
Kent Road, and walked on till I came to Gravesend, which is upwards of
twenty miles from Blackheath; at about seven o'clock in the evening,
without having eat anything the whole time. I applied to an inkeeper
(_sic_) there, pretending that I had served a haberdasher in London, who
left of (_sic_) business, and turned me away. He believed me; and got
me a passage in the coach here, for I said that I had an Uncle here, and
that my Father and Mother were dead;--when I wandered about the quays
for some time, till I met Captain Keys, whom I asked to give me a
passage to Boulogne; which he promised to do, and took me home to
breakfast with him: but Mrs. Keys questioned me a good deal; when I not
being able to make my story good, I was obliged to confess to her that
I had run away from you. Captain Keys says that he will keep me at his
house till you answer my letter.

                                                        "J. STERLING."

Anthony remembers the business well; but can assign no origin to
it,--some penalty, indignity or cross put suddenly on John, which the
hasty John considered unbearable. His Mother's inconsolable weeping, and
then his own astonishment at such a culprit's being forgiven, are all
that remain with Anthony. The steady historical style of the young
runaway of twelve, narrating merely, not in the least apologizing, is
also noticeable.

This was some six months after his little brother Edward's death; three
months after that of Hester, his little sister next in the family series
to him: troubled days for the poor Mother in that small household on
Blackheath, as there are for mothers in so many households in this
world! I have heard that Mrs. Sterling passed much of her time alone, at
this period. Her husband's pursuits, with his Wellesleys and the like,
often carrying him into Town and detaining him late there, she would
sit among her sleeping children, such of them as death had still spared,
perhaps thriftily plying her needle, full of mournful affectionate
night-thoughts,--apprehensive too, in her tremulous heart, that the head
of the house might have fallen among robbers in his way homeward.



CHAPTER IV. UNIVERSITIES: GLASGOW; CAMBRIDGE.

At a later stage, John had some instruction from a Dr. Waite at
Blackheath; and lastly, the family having now removed into Town, to
Seymour Street in the fashionable region there, he "read for a while
with Dr. Trollope, Master of Christ's Hospital;" which ended his school
history.

In this his ever-changing course, from Reece at Cowbridge to Trollope
in Christ's, which was passed so nomadically, under ferulas of various
color, the boy had, on the whole, snatched successfully a fair share
of what was going. Competent skill in construing Latin, I think also an
elementary knowledge of Greek; add ciphering to a small extent, Euclid
perhaps in a rather imaginary condition; a swift but not very legible or
handsome penmanship, and the copious prompt habit of employing it in all
manner of unconscious English prose composition, or even occasionally
in verse itself: this, or something like this, he had gained from his
grammar-schools: this is the most of what they offer to the poor young
soul in general, in these indigent times. The express schoolmaster is
not equal to much at present,--while the _un_express, for good or
for evil, is so busy with a poor little fellow! Other departments of
schooling had been infinitely more productive, for our young friend,
than the gerund-grinding one. A voracious reader I believe he all along
was,--had "read the whole Edinburgh Review" in these boyish years, and
out of the circulating libraries one knows not what cartloads; wading
like Ulysses towards his palace "through infinite dung." A voracious
observer and participator in all things he likewise all along was; and
had had his sights, and reflections, and sorrows and adventures, from
Kaimes Castle onward,--and had gone at least to Dover on his own score.
_Puer bonae spei_, as the school-albums say; a boy of whom much may be
hoped? Surely, in many senses, yes. A frank veracity is in him, truth
and courage, as the basis of all; and of wild gifts and graces there is
abundance. I figure him a brilliant, swift, voluble, affectionate and
pleasant creature; out of whom, if it were not that symptoms of delicate
health already show themselves, great things might be made. Promotions
at least, especially in this country and epoch of parliaments and
eloquent palavers, are surely very possible for such a one!


Being now turned of sixteen, and the family economics getting yearly
more propitious and flourishing, he, as his brother had already
been, was sent to Glasgow University, in which city their Mother had
connections. His brother and he were now all that remained of the
young family; much attached to one another in their College years as
afterwards. Glasgow, however, was not properly their College scene:
here, except that they had some tuition from Mr. Jacobson, then a senior
fellow-student, now (1851) the learned editor of St. Basil, and Regius
Professor of Divinity in Oxford, who continued ever afterwards a valued
intimate of John's, I find nothing special recorded of them. The Glasgow
curriculum, for John especially, lasted but one year; who, after some
farther tutorage from Mr. Jacobson or Dr. Trollope, was appointed for a
more ambitious sphere of education.

In the beginning of his nineteenth year, "in the autumn of 1824," he
went to Trinity College, Cambridge. His brother Anthony, who had already
been there a year, had just quitted this Establishment, and entered on
a military life under good omens; I think, at Dublin under the Lord
Lieutenant's patronage, to whose service he was, in some capacity,
attached. The two brothers, ever in company hitherto, parted roads
at this point; and, except on holiday visits and by frequent
correspondence, did not again live together; but they continued in a
true fraternal attachment while life lasted, and I believe never had
any even temporary estrangement, or on either side a cause for such. The
family, as I said, was now, for the last three years, reduced to these
two; the rest of the young ones, with their laughter and their
sorrows, all gone. The parents otherwise were prosperous in outward
circumstances; the Father's position more and more developing itself
into affluent security, an agreeable circle of acquaintance, and a
certain real influence, though of a peculiar sort, according to his
gifts for work in this world.


Sterling's Tutor at Trinity College was Julius Hare, now the
distinguished Archdeacon of Lewes:--who soon conceived a great esteem
for him, and continued ever afterwards, in looser or closer connection,
his loved and loving friend. As the Biographical and Editorial work
above alluded to abundantly evinces. Mr. Hare celebrates the wonderful
and beautiful gifts, the sparkling ingenuity, ready logic, eloquent
utterance, and noble generosities and pieties of his pupil;--records
in particular how once, on a sudden alarm of fire in some neighboring
College edifice while his lecture was proceeding, all hands rushed out
to help; how the undergraduates instantly formed themselves in lines
from the fire to the river, and in swift continuance kept passing
buckets as was needful, till the enemy was visibly fast yielding,--when
Mr. Hare, going along the line, was astonished to find Sterling, at the
river-end of it, standing up to his waist in water, deftly dealing with
the buckets as they came and went. You in the river, Sterling; you with
your coughs, and dangerous tendencies of health!--"Somebody must be
in it," answered Sterling; "why not I, as well as another?" Sterling's
friends may remember many traits of that kind. The swiftest in all
things, he was apt to be found at the head of the column, whithersoever
the march might be; if towards any brunt of danger, there was he surest
to be at the head; and of himself and his peculiar risks or impediments
he was negligent at all times, even to an excessive and plainly
unreasonable degree.

Mr. Hare justly refuses him the character of an exact scholar, or
technical proficient at any time in either of the ancient literatures.
But he freely read in Greek and Latin, as in various modern languages;
and in all fields, in the classical as well, his lively faculty of
recognition and assimilation had given him large booty in proportion to
his labor. One cannot under any circumstances conceive of Sterling as
a steady dictionary philologue, historian, or archaeologist; nor did he
here, nor could he well, attempt that course. At the same time, Greek
and the Greeks being here before him, he could not fail to gather
somewhat from it, to take some hue and shape from it. Accordingly there
is, to a singular extent, especially in his early writings, a
certain tinge of Grecism and Heathen classicality traceable in
him;--Classicality, indeed, which does not satisfy one's sense as real
or truly living, but which glitters with a certain genial, if perhaps
almost meretricious half-_japannish_ splendor,--greatly distinguishable
from mere gerund-grinding, and death in longs and shorts. If
Classicality mean the practical conception, or attempt to conceive, what
human life was in the epoch called classical,--perhaps few or none of
Sterling's contemporaries in that Cambridge establishment carried away
more of available Classicality than even he.

But here, as in his former schools, his studies and inquiries,
diligently prosecuted I believe, were of the most discursive
wide-flowing character; not steadily advancing along beaten roads
towards College honors, but pulsing out with impetuous irregularity
now on this tract, now on that, towards whatever spiritual Delphi might
promise to unfold the mystery of this world, and announce to him
what was, in our new day, the authentic message of the gods. His
speculations, readings, inferences, glances and conclusions were
doubtless sufficiently encyclopedic; his grand tutors the multifarious
set of Books he devoured. And perhaps,--as is the singular case in most
schools and educational establishments of this unexampled epoch,--it
was not the express set of arrangements in this or any extant University
that could essentially forward him, but only the implied and silent
ones; less in the prescribed "course of study," which seems to tend
no-whither, than--if you will consider it--in the generous (not
ungenerous) rebellion against said prescribed course, and the voluntary
spirit of endeavor and adventure excited thereby, does help lie for
a brave youth in such places. Curious to consider. The fagging, the
illicit boating, and the things _forbidden_ by the schoolmaster,--these,
I often notice in my Eton acquaintances, are the things that have done
them good; these, and not their inconsiderable or considerable knowledge
of the Greek accidence almost at all! What is Greek accidence, compared
to Spartan discipline, if it can be had? That latter is a real and grand
attainment. Certainly, if rebellion is unfortunately needful, and you
can rebel in a generous manner, several things may be acquired in that
operation,--rigorous mutual fidelity, reticence, steadfastness, mild
stoicism, and other virtues far transcending your Greek accidence.
Nor can the unwisest "prescribed course of study" be considered quite
useless, if it have incited you to try nobly on all sides for a course
of your own. A singular condition of Schools and High-schools, which
have come down, in their strange old clothes and "courses of study,"
from the monkish ages into this highly unmonkish one;--tragical
condition, at which the intelligent observer makes deep pause!

One benefit, not to be dissevered from the most obsolete University
still frequented by young ingenuous living souls, is that of manifold
collision and communication with the said young souls; which, to every
one of these coevals, is undoubtedly the most important branch of
breeding for him. In this point, as the learned Huber has insisted, [6]
the two English Universities,--their studies otherwise being granted to
be nearly useless, and even ill done of their kind,--far excel all other
Universities: so valuable are the rules of human behavior which from of
old have tacitly established themselves there; so manful, with all its
sad drawbacks, is the style of English character, "frank, simple,
rugged and yet courteous," which has tacitly but imperatively got itself
sanctioned and prescribed there. Such, in full sight of Continental and
other Universities, is Huber's opinion. Alas, the question of University
Reform goes deep at present; deep as the world;--and the real University
of these new epochs is yet a great way from us! Another judge in whom
I have confidence declares further, That of these two Universities,
Cambridge is decidedly the more catholic (not Roman catholic, but Human
catholic) in its tendencies and habitudes; and that in fact, of all the
miserable Schools and High-schools in the England of these years, he,
if reduced to choose from them, would choose Cambridge as a place
of culture for the young idea. So that, in these bad circumstances,
Sterling had perhaps rather made a hit than otherwise?


Sterling at Cambridge had undoubtedly a wide and rather genial circle of
comrades; and could not fail to be regarded and beloved by many of them.
Their life seems to have been an ardently speculating and talking one;
by no means excessively restrained within limits; and, in the more
adventurous heads like Sterling's, decidedly tending towards the
latitudinarian in most things. They had among them a Debating Society
called The Union; where on stated evenings was much logic, and other
spiritual fencing and ingenuous collision,--probably of a really
superior quality in that kind; for not a few of the then disputants have
since proved themselves men of parts, and attained distinction in the
intellectual walks of life. Frederic Maurice, Richard Trench, John
Kemble, Spedding, Venables, Charles Buller, Richard Milnes and
others:--I have heard that in speaking and arguing, Sterling was the
acknowledged chief in this Union Club; and that "none even came near
him, except the late Charles Buller," whose distinction in this and
higher respects was also already notable.

The questions agitated seem occasionally to have touched on the
political department, and even on the ecclesiastical. I have heard one
trait of Sterling's eloquence, which survived on the wings of grinning
rumor, and had evidently borne upon Church Conservatism in some form:
"Have they not,"--or perhaps it was, Has she (the Church) not,--"a
black dragoon in every parish, on good pay and rations, horse-meat and
man's-meat, to patrol and battle for these things?" The "black dragoon,"
which naturally at the moment ruffled the general young imagination
into stormy laughter, points towards important conclusions in respect
to Sterling at this time. I conclude he had, with his usual alacrity and
impetuous daring, frankly adopted the anti-superstitious side of things;
and stood scornfully prepared to repel all aggressions or pretensions
from the opposite quarter. In short, that he was already, what
afterwards there is no doubt about his being, at all points a Radical,
as the name or nickname then went. In other words, a young ardent soul
looking with hope and joy into a world which was infinitely beautiful to
him, though overhung with falsities and foul cobwebs as world never was
before; overloaded, overclouded, to the zenith and the nadir of it,
by incredible uncredited traditions, solemnly sordid hypocrisies, and
beggarly deliriums old and new; which latter class of objects it was
clearly the part of every noble heart to expend all its lightnings and
energies in burning up without delay, and sweeping into their native
Chaos out of such a Cosmos as this. Which process, it did not then seem
to him could be very difficult; or attended with much other than heroic
joy, and enthusiasm of victory or of battle, to the gallant operator, in
his part of it. This was, with modifications such as might be, the
humor and creed of College Radicalism five-and-twenty years ago. Rather
horrible at that time; seen to be not so horrible now, at least to have
grown very universal, and to need no concealment now. The natural
humor and attitude, we may well regret to say,--and honorable not
dishonorable, for a brave young soul such as Sterling's, in those years
in those localities!

I do not find that Sterling had, at that stage, adopted the then
prevalent Utilitarian theory of human things. But neither, apparently,
had he rejected it; still less did he yet at all denounce it with the
damnatory vehemence we were used to in him at a later period. Probably
he, so much occupied with the negative side of things, had not yet
thought seriously of any positive basis for his world; or asked himself,
too earnestly, What, then, is the noble rule of living for a man?
In this world so eclipsed and scandalously overhung with fable and
hypocrisy, what is the eternal fact, on which a man may front the
Destinies and the Immensities? The day for such questions, sure enough
to come in his case, was still but coming. Sufficient for this day
be the work thereof; that of blasting into merited annihilation the
innumerable and immeasurable recognized deliriums, and extirpating or
coercing to the due pitch those legions of "black dragoons," of all
varieties and purposes, who patrol, with horse-meat and man's-meat, this
afflicted earth, so hugely to the detriment of it.


Sterling, it appears, after above a year of Trinity College, followed
his friend Maurice into Trinity Hall, with the intention of taking
a degree in Law; which intention, like many others with him, came to
nothing; and in 1827 he left Trinity Hall and Cambridge altogether; here
ending, after two years, his brief University life.



CHAPTER V. A PROFESSION.

Here, then, is a young soul, brought to the years of legal majority,
furnished from his training-schools with such and such shining
capabilities, and ushered on the scene of things to inquire practically,
What he will do there? Piety is in the man, noble human valor, bright
intelligence, ardent proud veracity; light and fire, in none of their
many senses, wanting for him, but abundantly bestowed: a kingly kind of
man;--whose "kingdom," however, in this bewildered place and epoch of
the world will probably be difficult to find and conquer!

For, alas, the world, as we said, already stands convicted to this young
soul of being an untrue, unblessed world; its high dignitaries many
of them phantasms and players'-masks; its worthships and worships
unworshipful: from Dan to Beersheba, a mad world, my masters. And surely
we may say, and none will now gainsay, this his idea of the world at
that epoch was nearer to the fact than at most other epochs it has been.
Truly, in all times and places, the young ardent soul that enters on
this world with heroic purpose, with veracious insight, and the
yet unclouded "inspiration of the Almighty" which has given us our
intelligence, will find this world a very mad one: why else is he, with
his little outfit of heroisms and inspirations, come hither into it,
except to make it diligently a little saner? Of him there would have
been no need, had it been quite sane. This is true; this will, in all
centuries and countries, be true.

And yet perhaps of no time or country, for the last two thousand years,
was it _so_ true as here in this waste-weltering epoch of Sterling's and
ours. A world all rocking and plunging, like that old Roman one when the
measure of its iniquities was full; the abysses, and subterranean and
supernal deluges, plainly broken loose; in the wild dim-lighted chaos
all stars of Heaven gone out. No star of Heaven visible, hardly now to
any man; the pestiferous fogs, and foul exhalations grown continual,
have, except on the highest mountaintops, blotted out all stars:
will-o'-wisps, of various course and color, take the place of stars.
Over the wild-surging chaos, in the leaden air, are only sudden glares
of revolutionary lightning; then mere darkness, with philanthropistic
phosphorescences, empty meteoric lights; here and there an
ecclesiastical luminary still hovering, hanging on to its old quaking
fixtures, pretending still to be a Moon or Sun,--though visibly it is
but a Chinese lantern made of _paper_ mainly, with candle-end foully
dying in the heart of it. Surely as mad a world as you could wish!

If you want to make sudden fortunes in it, and achieve the temporary
hallelujah of flunkies for yourself, renouncing the perennial esteem
of wise men; if you can believe that the chief end of man is to collect
about him a bigger heap of gold than ever before, in a shorter time than
ever before, you will find it a most handy and every way furthersome,
blessed and felicitous world. But for any other human aim, I think you
will find it not furthersome. If you in any way ask practically, How a
noble life is to be led in it? you will be luckier than Sterling or I if
you get any credible answer, or find any made road whatever. Alas, it is
even so. Your heart's question, if it be of that sort, most things and
persons will answer with a "Nonsense! Noble life is in Drury Lane,
and wears yellow boots. You fool, compose yourself to your
pudding!"--Surely, in these times, if ever in any, the young heroic soul
entering on life, so opulent, full of sunny hope, of noble valor and
divine intention, is tragical as well as beautiful to us.

Of the three learned Professions none offered any likelihood for
Sterling. From the Church his notions of the "black dragoon," had there
been no other obstacle, were sufficient to exclude him. Law he had just
renounced, his own Radical philosophies disheartening him, in face of
the ponderous impediments, continual up-hill struggles and formidable
toils inherent in such a pursuit: with Medicine he had never been in
any contiguity, that he should dream of it as a course for him. Clearly
enough the professions were unsuitable; they to him, he to them.
Professions, built so largely on speciosity instead of performance;
clogged, in this bad epoch, and defaced under such suspicions of fatal
imposture, were hateful not lovable to the young radical soul, scornful
of gross profit, and intent on ideals and human noblenesses. Again, the
professions, were they never so perfect and veracious, will require slow
steady pulling, to which this individual young radical, with his swift,
far-darting brilliancies, and nomadic desultory ways, is of all men the
most averse and unfitted. No profession could, in any case, have well
gained the early love of Sterling. And perhaps withal the most tragic
element of his life is even this, That there now was none to which
he could fitly, by those wiser than himself, have been bound and
constrained, that he might learn to love it. So swift, light-limbed and
fiery an Arab courser ought, for all manner of reasons, to have
been trained to saddle and harness. Roaming at full gallop over the
heaths,--especially when your heath was London, and English and
European life, in the nineteenth century,--he suffered much, and did
comparatively little. I have known few creatures whom it was more
wasteful to send forth with the bridle thrown up, and to set to
steeple-hunting instead of running on highways! But it is the lot of
many such, in this dislocated time,--Heaven mend it! In a better time
there will be other "professions" than those three extremely cramp,
confused and indeed almost obsolete ones: professions, if possible,
that are true, and do _not_ require you at the threshold to constitute
yourself an impostor. Human association,--which will mean discipline,
vigorous wise subordination and co-ordination,--is so unspeakably
important. Professions, "regimented human pursuits," how many of
honorable and manful might be possible for men; and which should _not_,
in their results to society, need to stumble along, in such an unwieldy
futile manner, with legs swollen into such enormous elephantiasis and no
go at all in them! Men will one day think of the force they squander in
every generation, and the fatal damage they encounter, by this neglect.


The career likeliest for Sterling, in his and the world's circumstances,
would have been what is called public life: some secretarial, diplomatic
or other official training, to issue if possible in Parliament as the
true field for him. And here, beyond question, had the gross material
conditions been allowed, his spiritual capabilities were first-rate.
In any arena where eloquence and argument was the point, this man
was calculated to have borne the bell from all competitors. In lucid
ingenious talk and logic, in all manner of brilliant utterance and
tongue-fence, I have hardly known his fellow. So ready lay his store of
knowledge round him, so perfect was his ready utterance of the same,--in
coruscating wit, in jocund drollery, in compact articulated clearness
or high poignant emphasis, as the case required,--he was a match for any
man in argument before a crowd of men. One of the most supple-wristed,
dexterous, graceful and successful fencers in that kind. A man, as Mr.
Hare has said, "able to argue with four or five at once;" could do the
parrying all round, in a succession swift as light, and plant his hits
wherever a chance offered. In Parliament, such a soul put into a body of
the due toughness might have carried it far. If ours is to be called, as
I hear some call it, the Talking Era, Sterling of all men had the talent
to excel in it.

Probably it was with some vague view towards chances in this direction
that Sterling's first engagement was entered upon; a brief connection as
Secretary to some Club or Association into which certain public men, of
the reforming sort, Mr. Crawford (the Oriental Diplomatist and Writer),
Mr. Kirkman Finlay (then Member for Glasgow), and other political
notabilities had now formed themselves,--with what specific objects I do
not know, nor with what result if any. I have heard vaguely, it was "to
open the trade to India." Of course they intended to stir up the public
mind into co-operation, whatever their goal or object was: Mr. Crawford,
an intimate in the Sterling household, recognized the fine literary
gift of John; and might think it a lucky hit that he had caught such a
Secretary for three hundred pounds a year. That was the salary agreed
upon; and for some months actually worked for and paid; Sterling
becoming for the time an intimate and almost an inmate in Mr. Crawford's
circle, doubtless not without results to himself beyond the secretarial
work and pounds sterling: so much is certain. But neither the
Secretaryship nor the Association itself had any continuance; nor can
I now learn accurately more of it than what is here stated;--in which
vague state it must vanish from Sterling's history again, as it in great
measure did from his life. From himself in after-years I never heard
mention of it; nor were his pursuits connected afterwards with those of
Mr. Crawford, though the mutual good-will continued unbroken.

In fact, however splendid and indubitable Sterling's qualifications for
a parliamentary life, there was that in him withal which flatly put
a negative on any such project. He had not the slow steady-pulling
diligence which is indispensable in that, as in all important pursuits
and strenuous human competitions whatsoever. In every sense, his
momentum depended on velocity of stroke, rather than on weight of metal;
"beautifulest sheet-lightning," as I often said, "not to be condensed
into thunder-bolts." Add to this,--what indeed is perhaps but the same
phenomenon in another form,--his bodily frame was thin, excitable,
already manifesting pulmonary symptoms; a body which the tear and wear
of Parliament would infallibly in few months have wrecked and ended.
By this path there was clearly no mounting. The far-darting, restlessly
coruscating soul, equips beyond all others to shine in the Talking
Era, and lead National Palavers with their _spolia opima_ captive, is
imprisoned in a fragile hectic body which quite forbids the adventure.
"_Es ist dafur gesorgt_," says Goethe, "Provision has been made that the
trees do not grow into the sky;"--means are always there to stop them
short of the sky.



CHAPTER VI. LITERATURE: THE ATHENAEUM.

Of all forms of public life, in the Talking Era, it was clear that only
one completely suited Sterling,--the anarchic, nomadic, entirely aerial
and unconditional one, called Literature. To this all his tendencies,
and fine gifts positive and negative, were evidently pointing; and here,
after such brief attempting or thoughts to attempt at other posts, he
already in this same year arrives. As many do, and ever more must do,
in these our years and times. This is the chaotic haven of so many
frustrate activities; where all manner of good gifts go up in far-seen
smoke or conflagration; and whole fleets, that might have been
war-fleets to conquer kingdoms, are _consumed_ (too truly, often), amid
"fame" enough, and the admiring shouts of the vulgar, which is always
fond to see fire going on. The true Canaan and Mount Zion of a
Talking Era must ever be Literature: the extraneous, miscellaneous,
self-elected, indescribable _Parliamentum_, or Talking Apparatus, which
talks by books and printed papers.

A literary Newspaper called _The Athenaeum_, the same which still
subsists, had been founded in those years by Mr. Buckingham; James Silk
Buckingham, who has since continued notable under various figures.
Mr. Buckingham's _Athenaeum_ had not as yet got into a flourishing
condition; and he was willing to sell the copyright of it for a
consideration. Perhaps Sterling and old Cambridge friends of his had
been already writing for it. At all events, Sterling, who had already
privately begun writing a Novel, and was clearly looking towards
Literature, perceived that his gifted Cambridge friend, Frederic
Maurice, was now also at large in a somewhat similar situation; and that
here was an opening for both of them, and for other gifted friends. The
copyright was purchased for I know not what sum, nor with whose money,
but guess it may have been Sterling's, and no great sum;--and so, under
free auspices, themselves their own captains, Maurice and he spread sail
for this new voyage of adventure into all the world. It was about the
end of 1828 that readers of periodical literature, and quidnuncs in
those departments, began to report the appearance, in a Paper called the
_Athenaeum, of_ writings showing a superior brilliancy, and height
of aim; one or perhaps two slight specimens of which came into my own
hands, in my remote corner, about that time, and were duly recognized by
me, while the authors were still far off and hidden behind deep veils.

Some of Sterling's best Papers from the _Athenaeum_ have been published
by Archdeacon Hare: first-fruits by a young man of twenty-two; crude,
imperfect, yet singularly beautiful and attractive; which will still
testify what high literary promise lay in him. The ruddiest glow of
young enthusiasm, of noble incipient spiritual manhood reigns over them;
once more a divine Universe unveiling itself in gloom and splendor, in
auroral firelight and many-tinted shadow, full of hope and full of awe,
to a young melodious pious heart just arrived upon it. Often enough the
delineation has a certain flowing completeness, not to be expected from
so young an artist; here and there is a decided felicity of insight;
everywhere the point of view adopted is a high and noble one, and the
result worked out a result to be sympathized with, and accepted so far
as it will go. Good reading still, those Papers, for the less-furnished
mind,--thrice-excellent reading compared with what is usually going.
For the rest, a grand melancholy is the prevailing impression they
leave;--partly as if, while the surface was so blooming and opulent,
the heart of them was still vacant, sad and cold. Here is a beautiful
mirage, in the dry wilderness; but you cannot quench your thirst there!
The writer's heart is indeed still too vacant, except of beautiful
shadows and reflexes and resonances; and is far from joyful, though it
wears commonly a smile.

In some of the Greek delineations (_The Lycian Painter_, for example),
we have already noticed a strange opulence of splendor, characterizable
as half-legitimate, half-meretricious,--a splendor hovering between the
raffaelesque and the japannish. What other things Sterling wrote there,
I never knew; nor would he in any mood, in those later days, have told
you, had you asked. This period of his life he always rather accounted,
as the Arabs do the idolatrous times before Mahomet's advent, the
"period of darkness."



CHAPTER VII. REGENT STREET.

On the commercial side the _Athenaeum_ still lacked success; nor was
like to find it under the highly uncommercial management it had now got
into. This, by and by, began to be a serious consideration. For money
is the sinews of Periodical Literature almost as much as of war itself;
without money, and under a constant drain of loss, Periodical Literature
is one of the things that cannot be carried on. In no long time Sterling
began to be practically sensible of this truth, and that an unpleasant
resolution in accordance with it would be necessary. By him also, after
a while, the _Athenaeum_ was transferred to other hands, better fitted
in that respect; and under these it did take vigorous root, and still
bears fruit according to its kind.

For the present, it brought him into the thick of London Literature,
especially of young London Literature and speculation; in which turbid
exciting element he swam and revelled, nothing loath, for certain months
longer,--a period short of two years in all. He had lodgings in
Regent Street: his Father's house, now a flourishing and stirring
establishment, in South Place, Knightsbridge, where, under the warmth of
increasing revenue and success, miscellaneous cheerful socialities and
abundant speculations, chiefly political (and not John's kind, but
that of the _Times_ Newspaper and the Clubs), were rife, he could visit
daily, and yet be master of his own studies and pursuits. Maurice,
Trench, John Mill, Charles Buller: these, and some few others, among
a wide circle of a transitory phantasmal character, whom he speedily
forgot and cared not to remember, were much about him; with these he in
all ways employed and disported himself: a first favorite with them all.

No pleasanter companion, I suppose, had any of them. So frank, open,
guileless, fearless, a brother to all worthy souls whatsoever. Come when
you might, here is he open-hearted, rich in cheerful fancies, in grave
logic, in all kinds of bright activity. If perceptibly or imperceptibly
there is a touch of ostentation in him, blame it not; it is so innocent,
so good and childlike. He is still fonder of jingling publicly, and
spreading on the table, your big purse of opulences than his own. Abrupt
too he is, cares little for big-wigs and garnitures; perhaps laughs
more than the real fun he has would order; but of arrogance there is
no vestige, of insincerity or of ill-nature none. These must have been
pleasant evenings in Regent Street, when the circle chanced to be well
adjusted there. At other times, Philistines would enter, what we call
bores, dullards, Children of Darkness; and then,--except in a hunt of
dullards, and a _bore-baiting_, which might be permissible,--the evening
was dark. Sterling, of course, had innumerable cares withal; and was
toiling like a slave; his very recreations almost a kind of work. An
enormous activity was in the man;--sufficient, in a body that could
have held it without breaking, to have gone far, even under the unstable
guidance it was like to have!

Thus, too, an extensive, very variegated circle of connections was
forming round him. Besides his _Athenaeum_ work, and evenings in Regent
Street and elsewhere, he makes visits to country-houses, the Bullers'
and others; converses with established gentlemen, with honorable women
not a few; is gay and welcome with the young of his own age; knows also
religious, witty, and other distinguished ladies, and is admiringly
known by them. On the whole, he is already locomotive; visits hither
and thither in a very rapid flying manner. Thus I find he had made one
flying visit to the Cumberland Lake-region in 1828, and got sight of
Wordsworth; and in the same year another flying one to Paris, and seen
with no undue enthusiasm the Saint-Simonian Portent just beginning
to preach for itself, and France in general simmering under a scum of
impieties, levities, Saint-Simonisms, and frothy fantasticalities of all
kinds, towards the boiling-over which soon made the Three Days of July
famous. But by far the most important foreign home he visited was that
of Coleridge on the Hill of Highgate,--if it were not rather a foreign
shrine and Dodona-Oracle, as he then reckoned,--to which (onwards from
1828, as would appear) he was already an assiduous pilgrim. Concerning
whom, and Sterling's all-important connection with him, there will be
much to say anon.

Here, from this period, is a Letter of Sterling's, which the glimpses
it affords of bright scenes and figures now sunk, so many of them,
sorrowfully to the realm of shadows, will render interesting to some of
my readers. To me on the mere Letter, not on its contents alone, there
is accidentally a kind of fateful stamp. A few months after Charles
Buller's death, while his loss was mourned by many hearts, and to his
poor Mother all light except what hung upon his memory had gone out in
the world, a certain delicate and friendly hand, hoping to give the poor
bereaved lady a good moment, sought out this Letter of Sterling's, one
morning, and called, with intent to read it to her:--alas, the poor lady
had herself fallen suddenly into the languors of death, help of another
grander sort now close at hand; and to her this Letter was never read!

On "Fanny Kemble," it appears, there is an Essay by Sterling in the
_Athenaeum_ of this year: "16th December, 1829." Very laudatory, I
conclude. He much admired her genius, nay was thought at one time to
be vaguely on the edge of still more chivalrous feelings. As the Letter
itself may perhaps indicate.

         "_To Anthony Sterling, Esq., 24th Regiment, Dublin_.
                                      "KNIGHTSBRIDGE, 10th Nov., 1829.

"MY DEAR ANTHONY,--Here in the Capital of England and of Europe,
there is less, so far as I hear, of movement and variety than in your
provincial Dublin, or among the Wicklow Mountains. We have the old
prospect of bricks and smoke, the old crowd of busy stupid faces, the
old occupations, the old sleepy amusements; and the latest news that
reaches us daily has an air of tiresome, doting antiquity. The world has
nothing for it but to exclaim with Faust, "Give me my youth again." And
as for me, my month of Cornish amusement is over; and I must tie myself
to my old employments. I have not much to tell you about these; but
perhaps you may like to hear of my expedition to the West.

"I wrote to Polvellan (Mr. Buller's) to announce the day on which I
intended to be there, so shortly before setting out, that there was
no time to receive an answer; and when I reached Devonport, which is
fifteen or sixteen miles from my place of destination, I found a letter
from Mrs. Buller, saying that she was coming in two days to a Ball at
Plymouth, and if I chose to stay in the mean while and look about me,
she would take me back with her. She added an introduction to a relation
of her husband's, a certain Captain Buller of the Rifles, who was with
the Depot there,--a pleasant person, who I believe had been
acquainted with Charlotte, [7] or at least had seen her. Under his
superintendence--...

"On leaving Devonport with Mrs. Buller, I went some of the way by water,
up the harbor and river; and the prospects are certainly very beautiful;
to say nothing of the large ships, which I admire almost as much as you,
though without knowing so much about them. There is a great deal of
fine scenery all along the road to Looe; and the House itself, a very
unpretending Gothic cottage, stands beautifully among trees, hills and
water, with the sea at the distance of a quarter of a mile.

"And here, among pleasant, good-natured, well-informed and clever
people, I spent an idle month. I dined at one or two Corporation
dinners; spent a few days at the old Mansion of Mr. Buller of Morval,
the patron of West Looe; and during the rest of the time, read, wrote,
played chess, lounged, and ate red mullet (he who has not done this
has not begun to live); talked of cookery to the philosophers, and of
metaphysics to Mrs. Buller; and altogether cultivated indolence,
and developed the faculty of nonsense with considerable pleasure and
unexampled success. Charles Buller you know: he has just come to town,
but I have not yet seen him. Arthur, his younger brother, I take to
be one of the handsomest men in England; and he too has considerable
talent. Mr. Buller the father is rather a clever man of sense, and
particularly good-natured and gentlemanly; and his wife, who was a
renowned beauty and queen of Calcutta, has still many striking and
delicate traces of what she was. Her conversation is more brilliant and
pleasant than that of any one I know; and, at all events, I am bound to
admire her for the kindness with which she patronizes me. I hope that,
some day or other, you may be acquainted with her.

"I believe I have seen no one in London about whom you would care to
hear,--unless the fame of Fanny Kemble has passed the Channel, and
astonished the Irish Barbarians in the midst of their bloody-minded
politics. Young Kemble, whom you have seen, is in Germany: but I have
the happiness of being also acquainted with his sister, the divine
Fanny; and I have seen her twice on the stage, and three or four times
in private, since my return from Cornwall. I had seen some beautiful
verses of hers, long before she was an actress; and her conversation
is full of spirit and talent. She never was taught to act at all; and
though there are many faults in her performance of Juliet, there is more
power than in any female playing I ever saw, except Pasta's Medea. She
is not handsome, rather short, and by no means delicately formed;
but her face is marked, and the eyes are brilliant, dark, and full of
character. She has far more ability than she ever can display on the
stage; but I have no doubt that, by practice and self-culture, she will
be a far finer actress at least than any one since Mrs. Siddons. I was
at Charles Kemble's a few evenings ago, when a drawing of Miss Kemble,
by Sir Thomas Lawrence, was brought in; and I have no doubt that you
will shortly see, even in Dublin, an engraving of her from it, very
unlike the caricatures that have hitherto appeared. I hate the stage;
and but for her, should very likely never have gone to a theatre again.
Even as it is, the annoyance is much more than the pleasure; but I
suppose I must go to see her in every character in which she acts. If
Charlotte cares for plays, let me know, and I will write in more detail
about this new Melpomene. I fear there are very few subjects on which I
can say anything that will in the least interest her.

                      "Ever affectionately yours,
                                                        "J. STERLING."

Sterling and his circle, as their ardent speculation and activity
fermented along, were in all things clear for progress, liberalism;
their politics, and view of the Universe, decisively of the Radical
sort. As indeed that of England then was, more than ever; the crust of
old hide-bound Toryism being now openly cracking towards some incurable
disruption, which accordingly ensued as the Reform Bill before long.
The Reform Bill already hung in the wind. Old hide-bound Toryism, long
recognized by all the world, and now at last obliged to recognize its
very self, for an overgrown Imposture, supporting itself not by human
reason, but by flunky blustering and brazen lying, superadded to mere
brute force, could be no creed for young Sterling and his friends. In
all things he and they were liberals, and, as was natural at this
stage, democrats; contemplating root-and-branch innovation by aid of the
hustings and ballot-box. Hustings and ballot-box had speedily to
vanish out of Sterling's thoughts: but the character of root-and-branch
innovator, essentially of "Radical Reformer," was indelible with him,
and under all forms could be traced as his character through life.

For the present, his and those young people's aim was: By democracy,
or what means there are, be all impostures put down. Speedy end to
Superstition,--a gentle one if you can contrive it, but an end. What can
it profit any mortal to adopt locutions and imaginations which do not
correspond to fact; which no sane mortal can deliberately adopt in his
soul as true; which the most orthodox of mortals can only, and this
after infinite essentially _impious_ effort to put out the eyes of his
mind, persuade himself to "believe that he believes"? Away with it; in
the name of God, come out of it, all true men!

Piety of heart, a certain reality of religious faith, was always
Sterling's, the gift of nature to him which he would not and could
not throw away; but I find at this time his religion is as good as
altogether Ethnic, Greekish, what Goethe calls the Heathen form of
religion. The Church, with her articles, is without relation to him.
And along with obsolete spiritualisms, he sees all manner of obsolete
thrones and big-wigged temporalities; and for them also can prophesy,
and wish, only a speedy doom. Doom inevitable, registered in Heaven's
Chancery from the beginning of days, doom unalterable as the pillars of
the world; the gods are angry, and all nature groans, till this doom of
eternal justice be fulfilled.

With gay audacity, with enthusiasm tempered by mockery, as is the manner
of young gifted men, this faith, grounded for the present on democracy
and hustings operations, and giving to all life the aspect of a
chivalrous battle-field, or almost of a gay though perilous tournament,
and bout of "A hundred knights against all comers,"--was maintained
by Sterling and his friends. And in fine, after whatever loud
remonstrances, and solemn considerations, and such shaking of our wigs
as is undoubtedly natural in the case, let us be just to it and him. We
shall have to admit, nay it will behoove us to see and practically know,
for ourselves and him and others, that the essence of this creed, in
times like ours, was right and not wrong. That, however the ground and
form of it might change, essentially it was the monition of his natal
genius to this as it is to every brave man; the behest of all his clear
insight into this Universe, the message of Heaven through him, which
he could not suppress, but was inspired and compelled to utter in
this world by such methods as he had. There for him lay the first
commandment; _this_ is what it would have been the unforgivable sin to
swerve from and desert: the treason of treasons for him, it were there;
compared with which all other sins are venial!

The message did not cease at all, as we shall see; the message was
ardently, if fitfully, continued to the end: but the methods, the tone
and dialect and all outer conditions of uttering it, underwent most
important modifications!



CHAPTER VIII. COLERIDGE.

Coleridge sat on the brow of Highgate Hill, in those years, looking down
on London and its smoke-tumult, like a sage escaped from the inanity of
life's battle; attracting towards him the thoughts of innumerable
brave souls still engaged there. His express contributions to
poetry, philosophy, or any specific province of human literature or
enlightenment, had been small and sadly intermittent; but he had,
especially among young inquiring men, a higher than literary, a kind
of prophetic or magician character. He was thought to hold, he alone
in England, the key of German and other Transcendentalisms; knew the
sublime secret of believing by "the reason" what "the understanding" had
been obliged to fling out as incredible; and could still, after Hume
and Voltaire had done their best and worst with him, profess himself an
orthodox Christian, and say and print to the Church of England, with its
singular old rubrics and surplices at Allhallowtide, _Esto perpetua_.
A sublime man; who, alone in those dark days, had saved his crown
of spiritual manhood; escaping from the black materialisms, and
revolutionary deluges, with "God, Freedom, Immortality" still his: a
king of men. The practical intellects of the world did not much heed
him, or carelessly reckoned him a metaphysical dreamer: but to the
rising spirits of the young generation he had this dusky sublime
character; and sat there as a kind of _Magus_, girt in mystery and
enigma; his Dodona oak-grove (Mr. Gilman's house at Highgate) whispering
strange things, uncertain whether oracles or jargon.

The Gilmans did not encourage much company, or excitation of any sort,
round their sage; nevertheless access to him, if a youth did reverently
wish it, was not difficult. He would stroll about the pleasant garden
with you, sit in the pleasant rooms of the place,--perhaps take you
to his own peculiar room, high up, with a rearward view, which was the
chief view of all. A really charming outlook, in fine weather. Close
at hand, wide sweep of flowery leafy gardens, their few houses mostly
hidden, the very chimney-pots veiled under blossomy umbrage, flowed
gloriously down hill; gloriously issuing in wide-tufted undulating
plain-country, rich in all charms of field and town. Waving blooming
country of the brightest green; dotted all over with handsome villas,
handsome groves; crossed by roads and human traffic, here inaudible or
heard only as a musical hum: and behind all swam, under olive-tinted
haze, the illimitable limitary ocean of London, with its domes and
steeples definite in the sun, big Paul's and the many memories attached
to it hanging high over all. Nowhere, of its kind, could you see a
grander prospect on a bright summer day, with the set of the air going
southward,--southward, and so draping with the city-smoke not you
but the city. Here for hours would Coleridge talk, concerning all
conceivable or inconceivable things; and liked nothing better than to
have an intelligent, or failing that, even a silent and patient human
listener. He distinguished himself to all that ever heard him as at
least the most surprising talker extant in this world,--and to some
small minority, by no means to all, as the most excellent.

The good man, he was now getting old, towards sixty perhaps; and
gave you the idea of a life that had been full of sufferings; a life
heavy-laden, half-vanquished, still swimming painfully in seas of
manifold physical and other bewilderment. Brow and head were round,
and of massive weight, but the face was flabby and irresolute. The
deep eyes, of a light hazel, were as full of sorrow as of inspiration;
confused pain looked mildly from them, as in a kind of mild
astonishment. The whole figure and air, good and amiable otherwise,
might be called flabby and irresolute; expressive of weakness under
possibility of strength. He hung loosely on his limbs, with knees bent,
and stooping attitude; in walking, he rather shuffled than decisively
steps; and a lady once remarked, he never could fix which side of the
garden walk would suit him best, but continually shifted, in corkscrew
fashion, and kept trying both. A heavy-laden, high-aspiring and surely
much-suffering man. His voice, naturally soft and good, had contracted
itself into a plaintive snuffle and singsong; he spoke as if
preaching,--you would have said, preaching earnestly and also hopelessly
the weightiest things. I still recollect his "object" and "subject,"
terms of continual recurrence in the Kantean province; and how he sang
and snuffled them into "om-m-mject" and "sum-m-mject," with a kind of
solemn shake or quaver, as he rolled along. No talk, in his century or
in any other, could be more surprising.

Sterling, who assiduously attended him, with profound reverence, and
was often with him by himself, for a good many months, gives a record
of their first colloquy. [8] Their colloquies were numerous, and he
had taken note of many; but they are all gone to the fire, except this
first, which Mr. Hare has printed,--unluckily without date. It contains
a number of ingenious, true and half-true observations, and is of
course a faithful epitome of the things said; but it gives small idea
of Coleridge's way of talking;--this one feature is perhaps the most
recognizable, "Our interview lasted for three hours, during which he
talked two hours and three quarters." Nothing could be more copious than
his talk; and furthermore it was always, virtually or literally, of
the nature of a monologue; suffering no interruption, however reverent;
hastily putting aside all foreign additions, annotations, or most
ingenuous desires for elucidation, as well-meant superfluities which
would never do. Besides, it was talk not flowing any-whither like
a river, but spreading every-whither in inextricable currents and
regurgitations like a lake or sea; terribly deficient in definite goal
or aim, nay often in logical intelligibility; _what_ you were to believe
or do, on any earthly or heavenly thing, obstinately refusing to appear
from it. So that, most times, you felt logically lost; swamped near to
drowning in this tide of ingenious vocables, spreading out boundless as
if to submerge the world.

To sit as a passive bucket and be pumped into, whether you consent or
not, can in the long-run be exhilarating to no creature; how eloquent
soever the flood of utterance that is descending. But if it be withal a
confused unintelligible flood of utterance, threatening to submerge all
known landmarks of thought, and drown the world and you!--I have heard
Coleridge talk, with eager musical energy, two stricken hours, his
face radiant and moist, and communicate no meaning whatsoever to any
individual of his hearers,--certain of whom, I for one, still kept
eagerly listening in hope; the most had long before given up, and formed
(if the room were large enough) secondary humming groups of their own.
He began anywhere: you put some question to him, made some suggestive
observation: instead of answering this, or decidedly setting out
towards answer of it, he would accumulate formidable apparatus, logical
swim-bladders, transcendental life-preservers and other precautionary
and vehiculatory gear, for setting out; perhaps did at last get under
way,--but was swiftly solicited, turned aside by the glance of some
radiant new game on this hand or that, into new courses; and ever into
new; and before long into all the Universe, where it was uncertain what
game you would catch, or whether any.

His talk, alas, was distinguished, like himself, by irresolution:
it disliked to be troubled with conditions, abstinences, definite
fulfilments;--loved to wander at its own sweet will, and make its
auditor and his claims and humble wishes a mere passive bucket for
itself! He had knowledge about many things and topics, much curious
reading; but generally all topics led him, after a pass or two, into
the high seas of theosophic philosophy, the hazy infinitude of Kantean
transcendentalism, with its "sum-m-mjects" and "om-m-mjects." Sad
enough; for with such indolent impatience of the claims and ignorances
of others, he had not the least talent for explaining this or anything
unknown to them; and you swam and fluttered in the mistiest wide
unintelligible deluge of things, for most part in a rather profitless
uncomfortable manner.

Glorious islets, too, I have seen rise out of the haze; but they were
few, and soon swallowed in the general element again. Balmy sunny
islets, islets of the blest and the intelligible:--on which occasions
those secondary humming groups would all cease humming, and hang
breathless upon the eloquent words; till once your islet got wrapt in
the mist again, and they could recommence humming. Eloquent artistically
expressive words you always had; piercing radiances of a most subtle
insight came at intervals; tones of noble pious sympathy, recognizable
as pious though strangely colored, were never wanting long: but in
general you could not call this aimless, cloud-capt, cloud-based,
lawlessly meandering human discourse of reason by the name of "excellent
talk," but only of "surprising;" and were reminded bitterly of Hazlitt's
account of it: "Excellent talker, very,--if you let him start from no
premises and come to no conclusion." Coleridge was not without what
talkers call wit, and there were touches of prickly sarcasm in him,
contemptuous enough of the world and its idols and popular dignitaries;
he had traits even of poetic humor: but in general he seemed deficient
in laughter; or indeed in sympathy for concrete human things either on
the sunny or on the stormy side. One right peal of concrete laughter at
some convicted flesh-and-blood absurdity, one burst of noble indignation
at some injustice or depravity, rubbing elbows with us on this solid
Earth, how strange would it have been in that Kantean haze-world, and
how infinitely cheering amid its vacant air-castles and dim-melting
ghosts and shadows! None such ever came. His life had been an abstract
thinking and dreaming, idealistic, passed amid the ghosts of
defunct bodies and of unborn ones. The moaning singsong of that
theosophico-metaphysical monotony left on you, at last, a very dreary
feeling.

In close colloquy, flowing within narrower banks, I suppose he was more
definite and apprehensible; Sterling in after-times did not complain of
his unintelligibility, or imputed it only to the abtruse high nature of
the topics handled. Let us hope so, let us try to believe so! There
is no doubt but Coleridge could speak plain words on things plain: his
observations and responses on the trivial matters that occurred were as
simple as the commonest man's, or were even distinguished by superior
simplicity as well as pertinency. "Ah, your tea is too cold, Mr.
Coleridge!" mourned the good Mrs. Gilman once, in her kind, reverential
and yet protective manner, handing him a very tolerable though belated
cup.--"It's better than I deserve!" snuffled he, in a low hoarse murmur,
partly courteous, chiefly pious, the tone of which still abides with me:
"It's better than I deserve!"

But indeed, to the young ardent mind, instinct with pious nobleness, yet
driven to the grim deserts of Radicalism for a faith, his speculations
had a charm much more than literary, a charm almost religious and
prophetic. The constant gist of his discourse was lamentation over
the sunk condition of the world; which he recognized to be given up to
Atheism and Materialism, full of mere sordid misbeliefs, mispursuits and
misresults. All Science had become mechanical; the science not of men,
but of a kind of human beavers. Churches themselves had died away into a
godless mechanical condition; and stood there as mere Cases of Articles,
mere Forms of Churches; like the dried carcasses of once swift
camels, which you find left withering in the thirst of the universal
desert,--ghastly portents for the present, beneficent ships of the
desert no more. Men's souls were blinded, hebetated; and sunk under the
influence of Atheism and Materialism, and Hume and Voltaire: the world
for the present was as an extinct world, deserted of God, and incapable
of well-doing till it changed its heart and spirit. This, expressed
I think with less of indignation and with more of long-drawn
querulousness, was always recognizable as the ground-tone:--in which
truly a pious young heart, driven into Radicalism and the opposition
party, could not but recognize a too sorrowful truth; and ask of the
Oracle, with all earnestness, What remedy, then?

The remedy, though Coleridge himself professed to see it as in sunbeams,
could not, except by processes unspeakably difficult, be described to
you at all. On the whole, those dead Churches, this dead English Church
especially, must be brought to life again. Why not? It was not dead;
the soul of it, in this parched-up body, was tragically asleep only.
Atheistic Philosophy was true on its side, and Hume and Voltaire could
on their own ground speak irrefragably for themselves against any
Church: but lift the Church and them into a higher sphere. Of argument,
_they_ died into inanition, the Church revivified itself into pristine
florid vigor,--became once more a living ship of the desert, and
invincibly bore you over stock and stone. But how, but how! By attending
to the "reason" of man, said Coleridge, and duly chaining up the
"understanding" of man: the _Vernunft_ (Reason) and _Verstand_
(Understanding) of the Germans, it all turned upon these, if you could
well understand them,--which you couldn't. For the rest, Mr. Coleridge
had on the anvil various Books, especially was about to write one grand
Book _On the Logos_, which would help to bridge the chasm for us.
So much appeared, however: Churches, though proved false (as you had
imagined), were still true (as you were to imagine): here was an Artist
who could burn you up an old Church, root and branch; and then as the
Alchemists professed to do with organic substances in general, distil
you an "Astral Spirit" from the ashes, which was the very image of the
old burnt article, its air-drawn counterpart,--this you still had, or
might get, and draw uses from, if you could. Wait till the Book on the
Logos were done;--alas, till your own terrene eyes, blind with conceit
and the dust of logic, were purged, subtilized and spiritualized
into the sharpness of vision requisite for discerning such an
"om-m-mject."--The ingenuous young English head, of those days, stood
strangely puzzled by such revelations; uncertain whether it were getting
inspired, or getting infatuated into flat imbecility; and strange
effulgence, of new day or else of deeper meteoric night, colored the
horizon of the future for it.

Let me not be unjust to this memorable man. Surely there was here,
in his pious, ever-laboring, subtle mind, a precious truth, or
prefigurement of truth; and yet a fatal delusion withal. Prefigurement
that, in spite of beaver sciences and temporary spiritual hebetude and
cecity, man and his Universe were eternally divine; and that no past
nobleness, or revelation of the divine, could or would ever be lost to
him. Most true, surely, and worthy of all acceptance. Good also to do
what you can with old Churches and practical Symbols of the Noble: nay
quit not the burnt ruins of them while you find there is still gold
to be dug there. But, on the whole, do not think you can, by logical
alchemy, distil astral spirits from them; or if you could, that said
astral spirits, or defunct logical phantasms, could serve you in
anything. What the light of your mind, which is the direct inspiration
of the Almighty, pronounces incredible,--that, in God's name, leave
uncredited; at your peril do not try believing that. No subtlest
hocus-pocus of "reason" versus "understanding" will avail for that
feat;--and it is terribly perilous to try it in these provinces!

The truth is, I now see, Coleridge's talk and speculation was the emblem
of himself: in it as in him, a ray of heavenly inspiration struggled, in
a tragically ineffectual degree, with the weakness of flesh and blood.
He says once, he "had skirted the howling deserts of Infidelity;" this
was evident enough: but he had not had the courage, in defiance of pain
and terror, to press resolutely across said deserts to the new firm
lands of Faith beyond; he preferred to create logical fata-morganas for
himself on this hither side, and laboriously solace himself with these.

To the man himself Nature had given, in high measure, the seeds of
a noble endowment; and to unfold it had been forbidden him. A subtle
lynx-eyed intellect, tremulous pious sensibility to all good and all
beautiful; truly a ray of empyrean light;--but embedded in such weak
laxity of character, in such indolences and esuriences as had made
strange work with it. Once more, the tragic story of a high endowment
with an insufficient will. An eye to discern the divineness of the
Heaven's spendors and lightnings, the insatiable wish to revel in their
godlike radiances and brilliances; but no heart to front the scathing
terrors of them, which is the first condition of your conquering an
abiding place there. The courage necessary for him, above all things,
had been denied this man. His life, with such ray of the empyrean in it,
was great and terrible to him; and he had not valiantly grappled with
it, he had fled from it; sought refuge in vague daydreams, hollow
compromises, in opium, in theosophic metaphysics. Harsh pain, danger,
necessity, slavish harnessed toil, were of all things abhorrent to him.
And so the empyrean element, lying smothered under the terrene, and
yet inextinguishable there, made sad writhings. For pain, danger,
difficulty, steady slaving toil, and other highly disagreeable behests
of destiny, shall in nowise be shirked by any brightest mortal that will
approve himself loyal to his mission in this world; nay precisely
the higher he is, the deeper will be the disagreeableness, and the
detestability to flesh and blood, of the tasks laid on him; and the
heavier too, and more tragic, his penalties if he neglect them.

For the old Eternal Powers do live forever; nor do their laws know any
change, however we in our poor wigs and church-tippets may attempt
to read their laws. To _steal_ into Heaven,--by the modern method, of
sticking ostrich-like your head into fallacies on Earth, equally as
by the ancient and by all conceivable methods,--is forever forbidden.
High-treason is the name of that attempt; and it continues to be
punished as such. Strange enough: here once more was a kind of
Heaven-scaling Ixion; and to him, as to the old one, the just gods were
very stern! The ever-revolving, never-advancing Wheel (of a kind) was
his, through life; and from his Cloud-Juno did not he too procreate
strange Centaurs, spectral Puseyisms, monstrous illusory Hybrids, and
ecclesiastical Chimeras,--which now roam the earth in a very lamentable
manner!



CHAPTER IX. SPANISH EXILES.

This magical ingredient thrown into the wild caldron of such a mind,
which we have seen occupied hitherto with mere Ethnicism, Radicalism and
revolutionary tumult, but hungering all along for something higher and
better, was sure to be eagerly welcomed and imbibed, and could not fail
to produce important fermentations there. Fermentations; important new
directions, and withal important new perversions, in the spiritual life
of this man, as it has since done in the lives of so many. Here then
is the new celestial manna we were all in quest of? This thrice-refined
pabulum of transcendental moonshine? Whoso eateth thereof,--yes, what,
on the whole, will _he_ probably grow to?

Sterling never spoke much to me of his intercourse with Coleridge; and
when we did compare notes about him, it was usually rather in the way
of controversial discussion than of narrative. So that, from my own
resources, I can give no details of the business, nor specify anything
in it, except the general fact of an ardent attendance at Highgate
continued for many months, which was impressively known to all
Sterling's friends; and am unable to assign even the limitary dates,
Sterling's own papers on the subject having all been destroyed by
him. Inferences point to the end of 1828 as the beginning of this
intercourse; perhaps in 1829 it was at the highest point; and already in
1830, when the intercourse itself was about to terminate, we have proof
of the influences it was producing,--in the Novel of _Arthur Coningsby_,
then on hand, the first and only Book that Sterling ever wrote. His
writings hitherto had been sketches, criticisms, brief essays; he was
now trying it on a wider scale; but not yet with satisfactory results,
and it proved to be his only trial in that form.

He had already, as was intimated, given up his brief proprietorship of
the _Athenaeum_; the commercial indications, and state of sales and of
costs, peremptorily ordering him to do so; the copyright went by sale or
gift, I know not at what precise date, into other fitter hands; and with
the copyright all connection on the part of Sterling. To _Athenaeum_
Sketches had now (in 1829-30) succeeded _Arthur Coningsby_, a Novel
in three volumes; indicating (when it came to light, a year or
two afterwards) equally hasty and much more ambitious aims in
Literature;--giving strong evidence, too, of internal spiritual
revulsions going painfully forward, and in particular of the impression
Coleridge was producing on him. Without and within, it was a wild tide
of things this ardent light young soul was afloat upon, at present;
and his outlooks into the future, whether for his spiritual or economic
fortunes, were confused enough.

Among his familiars in this period, I might have mentioned one Charles
Barton, formerly his fellow-student at Cambridge, now an amiable,
cheerful, rather idle young fellow about Town; who led the way into
certain new experiences, and lighter fields, for Sterling. His Father,
Lieutenant-General Barton of the Life-guards, an Irish landlord, I think
in Fermanagh County, and a man of connections about Court, lived in
a certain figure here in Town; had a wife of fashionable habits, with
other sons, and also daughters, bred in this sphere. These, all of
them, were amiable, elegant and pleasant people;--such was especially
an eldest daughter, Susannah Barton, a stately blooming black-eyed young
woman, attractive enough in form and character; full of gay softness, of
indolent sense and enthusiasm; about Sterling's own age, if not a little
older. In this house, which opened to him, more decisively than
his Father's, a new stratum of society, and where his reception for
Charles's sake and his own was of the kindest, he liked very well to be;
and spent, I suppose, many of his vacant half-hours, lightly chatting
with the elders or the youngsters,--doubtless with the young lady too,
though as yet without particular intentions on either side.

Nor, with all the Coleridge fermentation, was democratic Radicalism
by any means given up;--though how it was to live if the Coleridgean
moonshine took effect, might have been an abtruse question. Hitherto,
while said moonshine was but taking effect, and coloring the outer
surface of things without quite penetrating into the heart, democratic
Liberalism, revolt against superstition and oppression, and help to
whosoever would revolt, was still the grand element in Sterling's creed;
and practically he stood, not ready only, but full of alacrity to fulfil
all its behests. We heard long since of the "black dragoons,"--whom
doubtless the new moonshine had considerably silvered-over into new
hues, by this time;--but here now, while Radicalism is tottering for him
and threatening to crumble, comes suddenly the grand consummation and
explosion of Radicalism in his life; whereby, all at once, Radicalism
exhausted and ended itself, and appeared no more there.


In those years a visible section of the London population, and
conspicuous out of all proportion to its size or value, was a small
knot of Spaniards, who had sought shelter here as Political Refugees.
"Political Refugees:" a tragic succession of that class is one of the
possessions of England in our time. Six-and-twenty years ago, when I
first saw London, I remember those unfortunate Spaniards among the new
phenomena. Daily in the cold spring air, under skies so unlike their
own, you could see a group of fifty or a hundred stately tragic figures,
in proud threadbare cloaks; perambulating, mostly with closed lips, the
broad pavements of Euston Square and the regions about St. Pancras new
Church. Their lodging was chiefly in Somers Town, as I understood: and
those open pavements about St. Pancras Church were the general place of
rendezvous. They spoke little or no English; knew nobody, could employ
themselves on nothing, in this new scene. Old steel-gray heads, many
of them; the shaggy, thick, blue-black hair of others struck you; their
brown complexion, dusky look of suppressed fire, in general their tragic
condition as of caged Numidian lions.

That particular Flight of Unfortunates has long since fled again, and
vanished; and new have come and fled. In this convulsed revolutionary
epoch, which already lasts above sixty years, what tragic flights of
such have we not seen arrive on the one safe coast which is open to
them, as they get successively vanquished, and chased into exile to
avoid worse! Swarm after swarm, of ever-new complexion, from Spain as
from other countries, is thrown off, in those ever-recurring paroxysms;
and will continue to be thrown off. As there could be (suggests
Linnaeus) a "flower-clock," measuring the hours of the day, and the
months of the year, by the kinds of flowers that go to sleep and awaken,
that blow into beauty and fade into dust: so in the great Revolutionary
Horologe, one might mark the years and epochs by the successive kinds of
exiles that walk London streets, and, in grim silent manner, demand
pity from us and reflections from us.--This then extant group of Spanish
Exiles was the Trocadero swarm, thrown off in 1823, in the Riego and
Quirogas quarrel. These were they whom Charles Tenth had, by sheer
force, driven from their constitutionalisms and their Trocadero
fortresses,--Charles Tenth, who himself was soon driven out, manifoldly
by sheer force; and had to head his own swarm of fugitives; and has now
himself quite vanished, and given place to others. For there is no end
of them; propelling and propelled!--

Of these poor Spanish Exiles, now vegetating about Somers Town, and
painfully beating the pavement in Euston Square, the acknowledged chief
was General Torrijos, a man of high qualities and fortunes, still in
the vigor of his years, and in these desperate circumstances refusing to
despair; with whom Sterling had, at this time, become intimate.



CHAPTER X. TORRIJOS.

Torrijos, who had now in 1829 been here some four or five years, having
come over in 1824, had from the first enjoyed a superior reception
in England. Possessing not only a language to speak, which few of the
others did, but manifold experiences courtly, military, diplomatic,
with fine natural faculties, and high Spanish manners tempered into
cosmopolitan, he had been welcomed in various circles of society;
and found, perhaps he alone of those Spaniards, a certain human
companionship among persons of some standing in this country. With the
elder Sterlings, among others, he had made acquaintance; became familiar
in the social circle at South Place, and was much esteemed there. With
Madam Torrijos, who also was a person of amiable and distinguished
qualities, an affectionate friendship grew up on the part of Mrs.
Sterling, which ended only with the death of these two ladies. John
Sterling, on arriving in London from his University work, naturally
inherited what he liked to take up of this relation: and in the lodgings
in Regent Street, and the democratico-literary element there, Torrijos
became a very prominent, and at length almost the central object.

The man himself, it is well known, was a valiant, gallant man; of
lively intellect, of noble chivalrous character: fine talents, fine
accomplishments, all grounding themselves on a certain rugged veracity,
recommended him to the discerning. He had begun youth in the Court of
Ferdinand; had gone on in Wellington and other arduous, victorious
and unvictorious, soldierings; familiar in camps and council-rooms,
in presence-chambers and in prisons. He knew romantic Spain;--he was
himself, standing withal in the vanguard of Freedom's fight, a kind of
living romance. Infinitely interesting to John Sterling, for one.

It was to Torrijos that the poor Spaniards of Somers Town looked mainly,
in their helplessness, for every species of help. Torrijos, it was
hoped, would yet lead them into Spain and glorious victory there;
meanwhile here in England, under defeat, he was their captain and
sovereign in another painfully inverse sense. To whom, in extremity,
everybody might apply. When all present resources failed, and the
exchequer was quite out, there still remained Torrijos. Torrijos has to
find new resources for his destitute patriots, find loans, find Spanish
lessons for them among his English friends: in all which charitable
operations, it need not be said, John Sterling was his foremost man;
zealous to empty his own purse for the object; impetuous in rushing
hither or thither to enlist the aid of others, and find lessons or
something that would do. His friends, of course, had to assist; the
Bartons, among others, were wont to assist;--and I have heard that the
fair Susan, stirring up her indolent enthusiasm into practicality, was
very successful in finding Spanish lessons, and the like, for these
distressed men. Sterling and his friends were yet new in this business;
but Torrijos and the others were getting old in it?--and doubtless weary
and almost desperate of it. They had now been seven years in it, many of
them; and were asking, When will the end be?

Torrijos is described as a man of excellent discernment: who knows how
long he had repressed the unreasonable schemes of his followers, and
turned a deaf ear to the temptings of fallacious hope? But there comes
at length a sum-total of oppressive burdens which is intolerable, which
tempts the wisest towards fallacies for relief. These weary groups,
pacing the Euston-Square pavements, had often said in their despair,
"Were not death in battle better? Here are we slowly mouldering into
nothingness; there we might reach it rapidly, in flaming splendor.
Flame, either of victory to Spain and us, or of a patriot death, the
sure harbinger of victory to Spain. Flame fit to kindle a fire which no
Ferdinand, with all his Inquisitions and Charles Tenths, could put
out." Enough, in the end of 1829, Torrijos himself had yielded to this
pressure; and hoping against hope, persuaded himself that if he could
but land in the South of Spain with a small patriot band well armed
and well resolved, a band carrying fire in its heart,--then Spain, all
inflammable as touchwood, and groaning indignantly under its brutal
tyrant, might blaze wholly into flame round him, and incalculable
victory be won. Such was his conclusion; not sudden, yet surely not
deliberate either,--desperate rather, and forced on by circumstances.
He thought with himself that, considering Somers Town and considering
Spain, the terrible chance was worth trying; that this big game of Fate,
go how it might, was one which the omens credibly declared he and these
poor Spaniards ought to play.

His whole industries and energies were thereupon bent towards starting
the said game; and his thought and continual speech and song now was,
That if he had a few thousand pounds to buy arms, to freight a ship and
make the other preparations, he and these poor gentlemen, and Spain and
the world, were made men and a saved Spain and world. What talks and
consultations in the apartment in Regent Street, during those winter
days of 1829-30; setting into open conflagration the young democracy
that was wont to assemble there! Of which there is now left next to
no remembrance. For Sterling never spoke a word of this affair in
after-days, nor was any of the actors much tempted to speak. We can
understand too well that here were young fervid hearts in an explosive
condition; young rash heads, sanctioned by a man's experienced head.
Here at last shall enthusiasm and theory become practice and fact; fiery
dreams are at last permitted to realize themselves; and now is the time
or never!--How the Coleridge moonshine comported itself amid these hot
telluric flames, or whether it had not yet begun to play there (which I
rather doubt), must be left to conjecture.

Mr. Hare speaks of Sterling "sailing over to St. Valery in an open
boat along with others," upon one occasion, in this enterprise;--in
the _final_ English scene of it, I suppose. Which is very possible.
Unquestionably there was adventure enough of other kinds for it, and
running to and fro with all his speed on behalf of it, during these
months of his history! Money was subscribed, collected: the young
Cambridge democrats were all ablaze to assist Torrijos; nay certain of
them decided to go with him,--and went. Only, as yet, the funds were
rather incomplete. And here, as I learn from a good hand, is the secret
history of their becoming complete. Which, as we are upon the subject,
I had better give. But for the following circumstance, they had perhaps
never been completed; nor had the rash enterprise, or its catastrophe,
so influential on the rest of Sterling's life, taken place at all.

A certain Lieutenant Robert Boyd, of the Indian Army, an Ulster
Irishman, a cousin of Sterling's, had received some affront, or
otherwise taken some disgust in that service; had thrown up his
commission in consequence; and returned home, about this time, with
intent to seek another course of life. Having only, for outfit, these
impatient ardors, some experience in Indian drill exercise, and five
thousand pounds of inheritance, he found the enterprise attended with
difficulties; and was somewhat at a loss how to dispose of himself. Some
young Ulster comrade, in a partly similar situation, had pointed out to
him that there lay in a certain neighboring creek of the Irish coast, a
worn-out royal gun-brig condemned to sale, to be had dog-cheap: this he
proposed that they two, or in fact Boyd with his five thousand pounds,
should buy; that they should refit and arm and man it;--and sail
a-privateering "to the Eastern Archipelago," Philippine Isles, or I know
not where; and _so_ conquer the golden fleece.

Boyd naturally paused a little at this great proposal; did not quite
reject it; came across, with it and other fine projects and impatiences
fermenting in his head, to London, there to see and consider. It was in
the months when the Torrijos enterprise was in the birth-throes; crying
wildly for capital, of all things. Boyd naturally spoke of his projects
to Sterling,--of his gun-brig lying in the Irish creek, among others.
Sterling naturally said, "If you want an adventure of the Sea-king sort,
and propose to lay your money and your life into such a game, here is
Torrijos and Spain at his back; here is a golden fleece to conquer,
worth twenty Eastern Archipelagoes."--Boyd and Torrijos quickly met;
quickly bargained. Boyd's money was to go in purchasing, and storing
with a certain stock of arms and etceteras, a small ship in the Thames,
which should carry Boyd with Torrijos and the adventurers to the south
coast of Spain; and there, the game once played and won, Boyd was to
have promotion enough,--"the colonelcy of a Spanish cavalry regiment,"
for one express thing. What exact share Sterling had in this
negotiation, or whether he did not even take the prudent side and
caution Boyd to be wary I know not; but it was he that brought the
parties together; and all his friends knew, in silence, that to the end
of his life he painfully remembered that fact.

And so a ship was hired, or purchased, in the Thames; due furnishings
began to be executed in it; arms and stores were gradually got on board;
Torrijos with his Fifty picked Spaniards, in the mean while, getting
ready. This was in the spring of 1830. Boyd's 5000 pounds was the grand
nucleus of finance; but vigorous subscription was carried on likewise
in Sterling's young democratic circle, or wherever a member of it could
find access; not without considerable result, and with a zeal that may
be imagined. Nay, as above hinted, certain of these young men decided,
not to give their money only, but themselves along with it, as
democratic volunteers and soldiers of progress; among whom, it need not
be said, Sterling intended to be foremost. Busy weeks with him, those
spring ones of the year 1830! Through this small Note, accidentally
preserved to us, addressed to his friend Barton, we obtain a curious
glance into the subterranean workshop:--

        "_To Charles Barton, Esq., Dorset Sq., Regent's Park_.
                        [No date; apparently March or February, 1830.]

"MY DEAR CHARLES,--I have wanted to see you to talk to you about my
Foreign affairs. If you are going to be in London for a few days, I
believe you can be very useful to me, at a considerable expense and
trouble to yourself, in the way of buying accoutrements; _inter alia_, a
sword and a saddle,--not, you will understand, for my own use.

"Things are going on very well, but are very, even frightfully near;
only be quiet! Pray would you, in case of necessity, take a free passage
to Holland, next week or the week after; stay two or three days, and
come back, all expenses paid? If you write to B---- at Cambridge, tell
him above all things to hold his tongue. If you are near Palace Yard
to-morrow before two, pray come to see me. Do not come on purpose;
especially as I may perhaps be away, and at all events shall not be
there until eleven, nor perhaps till rather later.

"I fear I shall have alarmed your Mother by my irruption. Forgive me
for that and all my exactions from you. If the next month were over, I
should not have to trouble any one.

                        "Yours affectionately,
                                                        "J. STERLING."

Busy weeks indeed; and a glowing smithy-light coming through the
chinks!--The romance of _Arthur Coningsby_ lay written, or half-written,
in his desk; and here, in his heart and among his hands, was an acted
romance and unknown catastrophes keeping pace with that.

Doubts from the doctors, for his health was getting ominous, threw some
shade over the adventure. Reproachful reminiscences of Coleridge and
Theosophy were natural too; then fond regrets for Literature and its
glories: if you act your romance, how can you also write it? Regrets,
and reproachful reminiscences, from Art and Theosophy; perhaps some
tenderer regrets withal. A crisis in life had come; when, of innumerable
possibilities one possibility was to be elected king, and to swallow all
the rest, the rest of course made noise enough, and swelled themselves
to their biggest.


Meanwhile the ship was fast getting ready: on a certain day, it was
to drop quietly down the Thames; then touch at Deal, and take on board
Torrijos and his adventurers, who were to be in waiting and on the
outlook for them there. Let every man lay in his accoutrements, then;
let every man make his packages, his arrangements and farewells.
Sterling went to take leave of Miss Barton. "You are going, then; to
Spain? To rough it amid the storms of war and perilous insurrection; and
with that weak health of yours; and--we shall never see you more, then!"
Miss Barton, all her gayety gone, the dimpling softness become liquid
sorrow, and the musical ringing voice one wail of woe, "burst into
tears,"--so I have it on authority:--here was one possibility about to
be strangled that made unexpected noise! Sterling's interview ended in
the offer of his hand, and the acceptance of it;--any sacrifice to get
rid of this horrid Spanish business, and save the health and life of a
gifted young man so precious to the world and to another!

"Ill-health," as often afterwards in Sterling's life, when the excuse
was real enough but not the chief excuse; "ill-health, and insuperable
obstacles and engagements," had to bear the chief brunt in apologizing:
and, as Sterling's actual presence, or that of any Englishman except
Boyd and his money, was not in the least vital to the adventure, his
excuse was at once accepted. The English connections and subscriptions
are a given fact, to be presided over by what English volunteers there
are: and as for Englishmen, the fewer Englishmen that go, the larger
will be the share of influence for each. The other adventurers, Torrijos
among them in due readiness, moved silently one by one down to Deal;
Sterling, superintending the naval hands, on board their ship in
the Thames, was to see the last finish given to everything in that
department; then, on the set evening, to drop down quietly to Deal, and
there say _Andad con Dios_, and return.

Behold! Just before the set evening came, the Spanish Envoy at this
Court has got notice of what is going on; the Spanish Envoy, and of
course the British Foreign Secretary, and of course also the Thames
Police. Armed men spring suddenly on board, one day, while Sterling is
there; declare the ship seized and embargoed in the King's name; nobody
on board to stir till he has given some account of himself in due time
and place! Huge consternation, naturally, from stem to stern. Sterling,
whose presence of mind seldom forsook him, casts his eye over the River
and its craft; sees a wherry, privately signals it, drops rapidly on
board of it: "Stop!" fiercely interjects the marine policeman from the
ship's deck.--"Why stop? What use have you for me, or I for you?" and
the oars begin playing.--"Stop, or I'll shoot you!" cries the marine
policeman, drawing a pistol.--"No, you won't."--"I will!"--"If you do
you'll be hanged at the next Maidstone assizes, then; that's all,"--and
Sterling's wherry shot rapidly ashore; and out of this perilous
adventure.

That same night he posted down to Deal; disclosed to the Torrijos party
what catastrophe had come. No passage Spainward from the Thames; well
if arrestment do not suddenly come from the Thames! It was on this
occasion, I suppose, that the passage in the open boat to St. Valery
occurred;--speedy flight in what boat or boats, open or shut, could
be got at Deal on the sudden. Sterling himself, according to Hare's
authority, actually went with them so far. Enough, they got shipping,
as private passengers in one craft or the other; and, by degrees or at
once, arrived all at Gibraltar,--Boyd, one or two young democrats of
Regent Street, the fifty picked Spaniards, and Torrijos,--safe, though
without arms; still in the early part of the year.



CHAPTER XI. MARRIAGE: ILL-HEALTH; WEST-INDIES.

Sterling's outlooks and occupations, now that his Spanish friends were
gone, must have been of a rather miscellaneous confused description.
He had the enterprise of a married life close before him; and as yet
no profession, no fixed pursuit whatever. His health was already very
threatening; often such as to disable him from present activity,
and occasion the gravest apprehensions; practically blocking up all
important courses whatsoever, and rendering the future, if even
life were lengthened and he had any future, an insolubility for him.
Parliament was shut, public life was shut: Literature,--if, alas, any
solid fruit could lie in literature!

Or perhaps one's health would mend, after all; and many things be better
than was hoped! Sterling was not of a despondent temper, or given in
any measure to lie down and indolently moan: I fancy he walked briskly
enough into this tempestuous-looking future; not heeding too much its
thunderous aspects; doing swiftly, for the day, what his hand found to
do. _Arthur Coningsby_, I suppose, lay on the anvil at present; visits
to Coleridge were now again more possible; grand news from Torrijos
might be looked for, though only small yet came:--nay here, in the hot
July, is France, at least, all thrown into volcano again! Here are the
miraculous Three Days; heralding, in thunder, great things to Torrijos
and others; filling with babblement and vaticination the mouths and
hearts of all democratic men.

So rolled along, in tumult of chaotic remembrance and uncertain hope,
in manifold emotion, and the confused struggle (for Sterling as for
the world) to extricate the New from the falling ruins of the Old, the
summer and autumn of 1830. From Gibraltar and Torrijos the tidings were
vague, unimportant and discouraging: attempt on Cadiz, attempt on the
lines of St. Roch, those attempts, or rather resolutions to attempt,
had died in the birth, or almost before it. Men blamed Torrijos, little
knowing his impediments. Boyd was still patient at his post: others of
the young English (on the strength of the subscribed moneys) were said
to be thinking of tours,--perhaps in the Sierra Morena and neighboring
Quixote regions. From that Torrijos enterprise it did not seem that
anything considerable would come.


On the edge of winter, here at home, Sterling was married: "at
Christchurch, Marylebone, 2d November, 1830," say the records. His
blooming, kindly and true-hearted Wife had not much money, nor had he as
yet any: but friends on both sides were bountiful and hopeful; had
made up, for the young couple, the foundations of a modestly effective
household; and in the future there lay more substantial prospects. On
the finance side Sterling never had anything to suffer. His Wife, though
somewhat languid, and of indolent humor, was a graceful, pious-minded,
honorable and affectionate woman; she could not much support him in the
ever-shifting struggles of his life, but she faithfully attended him in
them, and loyally marched by his side through the changes and nomadic
pilgrimings, of which many were appointed him in his short course.

Unhappily a few weeks after his marriage, and before any household was
yet set up, he fell dangerously ill; worse in health than he had ever
yet been: so many agitations crowded into the last few months had been
too much for him. He fell into dangerous pulmonary illness, sank ever
deeper; lay for many weeks in his Father's house utterly prostrate,
his young Wife and his Mother watching over him; friends, sparingly
admitted, long despairing of his life. All prospects in this world were
now apparently shut upon him.

After a while, came hope again, and kindlier symptoms: but the doctors
intimated that there lay consumption in the question, and that perfect
recovery was not to be looked for. For weeks he had been confined to
bed; it was several months before he could leave his sick-room,
where the visits of a few friends had much cheered him. And now when
delivered, readmitted to the air of day again,--weak as he was, and with
such a liability still lurking in him,--what his young partner and he
were to do, or whitherward to turn for a good course of life, was by no
means too apparent.


One of his Mother Mrs. Edward Sterling's Uncles, a Coningham from Derry,
had, in the course of his industrious and adventurous life, realized
large property in the West Indies,--a valuable Sugar-estate, with its
equipments, in the Island of St. Vincent;--from which Mrs. Sterling
and her family were now, and had been for some years before her Uncle's
decease, deriving important benefits. I have heard, it was then worth
some ten thousand pounds a year to the parties interested. Anthony
Sterling, John, and another a cousin of theirs were ultimately to be
heirs, in equal proportions. The old gentleman, always kind to his
kindred, and a brave and solid man though somewhat abrupt in his ways,
had lately died; leaving a settlement to this effect, not without some
intricacies, and almost caprices, in the conditions attached.

This property, which is still a valuable one, was Sterling's chief
pecuniary outlook for the distant future. Of course it well deserved
taking care of; and if the eye of the master were upon it, of course
too (according to the adage) the cattle would fatten better. As the
warm climate was favorable to pulmonary complaints, and Sterling's
occupations were so shattered to pieces and his outlooks here so waste
and vague, why should not he undertake this duty for himself and others?

It was fixed upon as the eligiblest course. A visit to St. Vincent,
perhaps a permanent residence there: he went into the project with his
customary impetuosity; his young Wife cheerfully consenting, and all
manner of new hopes clustering round it. There are the rich tropical
sceneries, the romance of the torrid zone with its new skies and
seas and lands; there are Blacks, and the Slavery question to be
investigated: there are the bronzed Whites and Yellows, and their
strange new way of life: by all means let us go and try!--Arrangements
being completed, so soon as his strength had sufficiently recovered, and
the harsh spring winds had sufficiently abated, Sterling with his small
household set sail for St. Vincent; and arrived without accident. His
first child, a son Edward, now living and grown to manhood, was born
there, "at Brighton in the Island of St. Vincent," in the fall of that
year 1831.



CHAPTER XII. ISLAND OF ST. VINCENT.

Sterling found a pleasant residence, with all its adjuncts, ready
for him, at Colonarie, in this "volcanic Isle" under the hot sun. An
interesting Isle: a place of rugged chasms, precipitous gnarled
heights, and the most fruitful hollows; shaggy everywhere with luxuriant
vegetation; set under magnificent skies, in the mirror of the summer
seas; offering everywhere the grandest sudden outlooks and contrasts.
His Letters represent a placidly cheerful riding life: a pensive humor,
but the thunder-clouds all sleeping in the distance. Good relations
with a few neighboring planters; indifference to the noisy political
and other agitations of the rest: friendly, by no means romantic
appreciation of the Blacks; quiet prosperity economic and domestic: on
the whole a healthy and recommendable way of life, with Literature very
much in abeyance in it.

He writes to Mr. Hare (date not given): "The landscapes around me here
are noble and lovely as any that can be conceived on Earth. How indeed
could it be otherwise, in a small Island of volcanic mountains,
far within the Tropics, and perpetually covered with the richest
vegetation?" The moral aspect of things is by no means so good; but
neither is that without its fair features. "So far as I see, the Slaves
here are cunning, deceitful and idle; without any great aptitude for
ferocious crimes, and with very little scruple at committing others. But
I have seen them much only in very favorable circumstances. They are,
as a body, decidedly unfit for freedom; and if left, as at present,
completely in the hands of their masters, will never become so, unless
through the agency of the Methodists." [9]

In the Autumn came an immense hurricane; with new and indeed quite
perilous experiences of West-Indian life. This hasty Letter, addressed
to his Mother, is not intrinsically his remarkablest from St. Vincent:
but the body of fact delineated in it being so much the greatest, we
will quote it in preference. A West-Indian tornado, as John Sterling
witnesses it, and with vivid authenticity describes it, may be
considered worth looking at.

       "_To Mrs. Sterling, South Place, Knightsbridge, London_.
                            "BRIGHTON, ST. VINCENT, 28th August, 1831.

"MY DEAR MOTHER,--The packet came in yesterday; bringing me some
Newspapers, a Letter from my Father, and one from Anthony, with a few
lines from you. I wrote, some days ago, a hasty Note to my Father,
on the chance of its reaching you through Grenada sooner than any
communication by the packet; and in it I spoke of the great misfortune
which had befallen this Island and Barbadoes, but from which all those
you take an interest in have happily escaped unhurt.

"From the day of our arrival in the West Indies until Thursday the 11th
instant, which will long be a memorable day with us, I had been doing my
best to get ourselves established comfortably; and I had at last bought
the materials for making some additions to the house. But on the morning
I have mentioned, all that I had exerted myself to do, nearly all the
property both of Susan and myself, and the very house we lived in, were
suddenly destroyed by a visitation of Providence far more terrible than
any I have ever witnessed.

"When Susan came from her room, to breakfast, at eight o'clock, I
pointed out to her the extraordinary height and violence of the surf,
and the singular appearance of the clouds of heavy rain sweeping down
the valleys before us. At this time I had so little apprehension of what
was coming, that I talked of riding down to the shore when the storm
should abate, as I had never seen so fierce a sea. In about a quarter of
an hour the House-Negroes came in, to close the outside shutters of the
windows. They knew that the plantain-trees about the Negro houses had
been blown down in the night; and had told the maid-servant Tyrrell, but
I had heard nothing of it. A very few minutes after the closing of the
windows, I found that the shutters of Tyrrell's room, at the south and
commonly the most sheltered end of the House, were giving way. I tried
to tie them; but the silk handkerchief which I used soon gave way;
and as I had neither hammer, boards nor nails in the house, I could do
nothing more to keep out the tempest. I found, in pushing at the leaf of
the shutter, that the wind resisted, more as if it had been a stone wall
or a mass of iron, than a mere current of air. There were one or two
people outside trying to fasten the windows, and I went out to help; but
we had no tools at hand: one man was blown down the hill in front of the
house, before my face; and the other and myself had great difficulty in
getting back again inside the door. The rain on my face and hands felt
like so much small shot from a gun. There was great exertion necessary
to shut the door of the house.

"The windows at the end of the large room were now giving way; and I
suppose it was about nine o'clock, when the hurricane burst them in, as
if it had been a discharge from a battery of heavy cannon. The shutters
were first forced open, and the wind fastened them back to the wall;
and then the panes of glass were smashed by the mere force of the gale,
without anything having touched them. Even now I was not at all sure the
house would go. My books, I saw, were lost; for the rain poured past the
bookcases, as if it had been the Colonarie River. But we carried a good
deal of furniture into the passage at the entrance; we set Susan there
on a sofa, and the Black Housekeeper was even attempting to get her some
breakfast. The house, however, began to shake so violently, and the rain
was so searching, that she could not stay there long. She went into her
own room and I stayed to see what could be done.

"Under the forepart of the house, there are cellars built of stone,
but not arched. To these, however, there was no access except on the
outside; and I knew from my own experience that Susan could not have
gone a step beyond the door, without being carried away by the storm,
and probably killed on the spot. The only chance seemed to be that of
breaking through the floor. But when the old Cook and myself resolved on
this, we found that we had no instrument with which it would be possible
to do it. It was now clear that we had only God to trust in. The front
windows were giving way with successive crashes, and the floor shook
as you may have seen a carpet on a gusty day in London. I went into
our bedroom; where I found Susan, Tyrrell, and a little Colored girl of
seven or eight years old; and told them that we should probably not
be alive in half an hour. I could have escaped, if I had chosen to go
alone, by crawling on the ground either into the kitchen, a separate
stone building at no great distance, or into the open fields away from
trees or houses; but Susan could not have gone a yard. She became quite
calm when she knew the worst; and she sat on my knee in what seemed the
safest corner of the room, while every blast was bringing nearer and
nearer the moment of our seemingly certain destruction.--

"The house was under two parallel roofs; and the one next the sea,
which sheltered the other, and us who were under the other, went off, I
suppose about ten o'clock. After my old plan, I will give you a sketch,
from which you may perceive how we were situated:--

      [In print, a figure representing a floor-plan appears here]

The _a_, _a_ are the windows that were first destroyed: _b_ went next;
my books were between the windows _b_, and on the wall opposite to them.
The lines _c_ and _d_ mark the directions of the two roofs; _e_ is the
room in which we were, and 2 is a plan of it on a larger scale. Look
now at 2: _a_ is the bed; _c_, _c_ the two wardrobes; _b_ the corner
in which we were. I was sitting in an arm-chair, holding my Wife; and
Tyrrell and the little Black child were close to us. We had given up all
notion of surviving; and only waited for the fall of the roof to perish
together.

"Before long the roof went. Most of the materials, however, were carried
clear away: one of the large couples was caught on the bedpost marked
_d_, and held fast by the iron spike; while the end of it hung over our
heads: had the beam fallen an inch on either side of the bedpost, it
must necessarily have crushed us. The walls did not go with the roof;
and we remained for half an hour, alternately praying to God, and
watching them as they bent, creaked, and shivered before the storm.

"Tyrrell and the child, when the roof was off, made their way through
the remains of the partition, to the outer door; and with the help of
the people who were looking for us, got into the kitchen. A good while
after they were gone, and before we knew anything of their fate, a Negro
suddenly came upon us; and the sight of him gave us a hope of safety.
When the people learned that we were in danger, and while their own huts
were flying about their ears, they crowded to help us; and the old
Cook urged them on to our rescue. He made five attempts, after saving
Tyrrell, to get to us; and four times he was blown down. The fifth time
he, and the Negro we first saw, reached the house. The space they had
to traverse was not above twenty yards of level ground, if so much. In
another minute or two, the Overseers and a crowd of Negroes, most of
whom had come on their hands and knees, were surrounding us; and with
their help Susan was carried round to the end of the house; where they
broke open the cellar window, and placed her in comparative safety. The
force of the hurricane was, by this time, a good deal diminished, or it
would have been impossible to stand before it.

"But the wind was still terrific; and the rain poured into the cellars
through the floor above. Susan, Tyrrell, and a crowd of Negroes remained
under it, for more than two hours: and I was long afraid that the wet
and cold would kill her, if she did not perish more violently. Happily
we had wine and spirits at hand, and she was much nerved by a tumbler
of claret. As soon as I saw her in comparative security, I went off with
one of the Overseers down to the Works, where the greater number of the
Negroes were collected, that we might see what could be done for them.
They were wretched enough, but no one was hurt; and I ordered them a
dram apiece, which seemed to give them a good deal of consolation.

"Before I could make my way back, the hurricane became as bad as at
first; and I was obliged to take shelter for half an hour in a ruined
Negro house. This, however, was the last of its extreme violence. By
one o'clock, even the rain had in a great degree ceased; and as only
one room of the house, the one marked _f_; was standing, and that
rickety,--I had Susan carried in a chair down the hill, to the Hospital;
where, in a small paved unlighted room, she spent the next twenty-four
hours. She was far less injured than might have been expected from such
a catastrophe.

"Next day, I had the passage at the entrance of the house repaired and
roofed; and we returned to the ruins of our habitation, still encumbered
as they were with the wreck of almost all we were possessed of. The
walls of the part of the house next the sea were carried away, in less I
think than half an hour after we reached the cellar: when I had leisure
to examine the remains of the house, I found the floor strewn with
fragments of the building, and with broken furniture; and our books all
soaked as completely as if they had been for several hours in the sea.

"In the course of a few days I had the other room, _g_, which is under
the same roof as the one saved, rebuilt; and Susan stayed in this
temporary abode for a week,--when we left Colonarie, and came to
Brighton. Mr. Munro's kindness exceeds all precedent. We shall certainly
remain here till my Wife is recovered from her confinement. In the
mean while we shall have a new house built, in which we hope to be well
settled before Christmas.

"The roof was half blown off the kitchen, but I have had it mended
already; the other offices were all swept away. The gig is much injured;
and my horse received a wound in the fall of the stable, from which he
will not be recovered for some weeks: in the mean time I have no choice
but to buy another, as I must go at least once or twice a week to
Colonarie, besides business in Town. As to our own comforts, we can
scarcely expect ever to recover from the blow that has now stricken
us. No money would repay me for the loss of my books, of which a large
proportion had been in my hands for so many years that they were
like old and faithful friends, and of which many had been given me at
different times by the persons in the world whom I most value.

"But against all this I have to set the preservation of our lives, in
a way the most awfully providential; and the safety of every one on the
Estate. And I have also the great satisfaction of reflecting that all
the Negroes from whom any assistance could reasonably be expected,
behaved like so many Heroes of Antiquity; risking their lives and limbs
for us and our property, while their own poor houses were flying like
chaff before the hurricane. There are few White people here who can
say as much for their Black dependents; and the force and value of the
relation between Master and Slave has been tried by the late calamity on
a large scale.

"Great part of both sides of this Island has been laid completely
waste. The beautiful wide and fertile Plain called the Charib Country,
extending for many miles to the north of Colonarie, and formerly
containing the finest sets of works and best dwelling-houses in the
Island, is, I am told, completely desolate: on several estates not a
roof even of a Negro hut standing. In the embarrassed circumstances of
many of the proprietors, the ruin is, I fear, irreparable.--At Colonarie
the damage is serious, but by no means desperate. The crop is perhaps
injured ten or fifteen per cent. The roofs of several large buildings
are destroyed, but these we are already supplying; and the injuries done
to the cottages of the Negroes are, by this time, nearly if not quite
remedied.

"Indeed, all that has been suffered in St. Vincent appears nothing
when compared with the appalling loss of property and of human lives at
Barbadoes. There the Town is little but a heap of ruins, and the corpses
are reckoned by thousands; while throughout the Island there are not, I
believe, ten estates on which the buildings are standing. The Elliotts,
from whom we have heard, are living with all their family in a tent; and
may think themselves wonderfully saved, when whole families round them
were crushed at once beneath their houses. Hugh Barton, the only officer
of the Garrison hurt, has broken his arm, and we know nothing of his
prospects of recovery. The more horrible misfortune of Barbadoes is
partly to be accounted for by the fact of the hurricane having begun
there during the night. The flatness of the surface in that Island
presented no obstacle to the wind, which must, however, I think have
been in itself more furious than with us. No other island has suffered
considerably.

"I have told both my Uncle and Anthony that I have given you the details
of our recent history;--which are not so pleasant that I should wish to
write them again. Perhaps you will be good enough to let them see this,
as soon as you and my Father can spare it.... I am ever, dearest Mother,

                    "Your grateful and affectionate
                                                      "JOHN STERLING."

This Letter, I observe, is dated 28th August, 1831; which is otherwise a
day of mark to the world and me,--the Poet Goethe's last birthday. While
Sterling sat in the Tropical solitudes, penning this history, little
European Weimar had its carriages and state-carriages busy on the
streets, and was astir with compliments and visiting-cards, doing its
best, as heretofore, on behalf of a remarkable day; and was not, for
centuries or tens of centuries, to see the like of it again!--


At Brighton, the hospitable home of those Munros, our friends continued
for above two months. Their first child, Edward, as above noticed, was
born here, "14th October, 1831;"--and now the poor lady, safe from all
her various perils, could return to Colonarie under good auspices.

It was in this year that I first heard definitely of Sterling as a
contemporary existence; and laid up some note and outline of him in my
memory, as of one whom I might yet hope to know. John Mill, Mrs. Austin
and perhaps other friends, spoke of him with great affection and much
pitying admiration; and hoped to see him home again, under better omens,
from over the seas. As a gifted amiable being, of a certain radiant
tenuity and velocity, too thin and rapid and diffusive, in danger of
dissipating himself into the vague, or alas into death itself: it was
so that, like a spot of bright colors, rather than a portrait with
features, he hung occasionally visible in my imagination.



CHAPTER XIII. A CATASTROPHE.

The ruin of his house had hardly been repaired, when there arrived out
of Europe tidings which smote as with a still more fatal hurricane on
the four corners of his inner world, and awoke all the old thunders that
lay asleep on his horizon there. Tidings, at last of a decisive nature,
from Gibraltar and the Spanish democrat adventure. This is what the
Newspapers had to report--the catastrophe at once, the details by
degrees--from Spain concerning that affair, in the beginning of the new
year 1832.

Torrijos, as we have seen, had hitherto accomplished as good as nothing,
except disappointment to his impatient followers, and sorrow and regret
to himself. Poor Torrijos, on arriving at Gibraltar with his wild band,
and coming into contact with the rough fact, had found painfully how
much his imagination had deceived him. The fact lay round him haggard
and iron-bound; flatly refusing to be handled according to his scheme
of it. No Spanish soldiery nor citizenry showed the least disposition to
join him; on the contrary the official Spaniards of that coast seemed
to have the watchfulest eye on all his movements, nay it was conjectured
they had spies in Gibraltar who gathered his very intentions and
betrayed them. This small project of attack, and then that other,
proved futile, or was abandoned before the attempt. Torrijos had to lie
painfully within the lines of Gibraltar,--his poor followers reduced to
extremity of impatience and distress; the British Governor too, though
not unfriendly to him, obliged to frown. As for the young Cantabs, they,
as was said, had wandered a little over the South border of romantic
Spain; had perhaps seen Seville, Cadiz, with picturesque views, since
not with belligerent ones; and their money being done, had now returned
home. So had it lasted for eighteen months.

The French Three Days breaking out had armed the Guerrillero Mina, armed
all manner of democratic guerrieros and guerrilleros; and considerable
clouds of Invasion, from Spanish exiles, hung minatory over the North
and North-East of Spain, supported by the new-born French Democracy,
so far as privately possible. These Torrijos had to look upon with
inexpressible feelings, and take no hand in supporting from the South;
these also he had to see brushed away, successively abolished by
official generalship; and to sit within his lines, in the painfulest
manner, unable to do anything. The fated, gallant-minded, but too
headlong man. At length the British Governor himself was obliged, in
official decency and as is thought on repeated remonstrance from his
Spanish official neighbors, to signify how indecorous, improper
and impossible it was to harbor within one's lines such explosive
preparations, once they were discovered, against allies in full peace
with us,--the necessity, in fact, there was for the matter ending. It
is said, he offered Torrijos and his people passports, and British
protection, to any country of the world except Spain: Torrijos did not
accept the passports; spoke of going peaceably to this place or to that;
promised at least, what he saw and felt to be clearly necessary, that he
would soon leave Gibraltar. And he did soon leave it; he and his, Boyd
alone of the Englishmen being now with him.

It was on the last night of November, 1831, that they all set forth;
Torrijos with Fifty-five companions; and in two small vessels committed
themselves to their nigh-desperate fortune. No sentry or official person
had noticed them; it was from the Spanish Consul, next morning, that the
British Governor first heard they were gone. The British Governor knew
nothing of them; but apparently the Spanish officials were much better
informed. Spanish guardships, instantly awake, gave chase to the two
small vessels, which were making all sail towards Malaga; and, on shore,
all manner of troops and detached parties were in motion, to render a
retreat to Gibraltar by land impossible.

Crowd all sail for Malaga, then; there perhaps a regiment will join us;
there,--or if not, we are but lost! Fancy need not paint a more tragic
situation than that of Torrijos, the unfortunate gallant man, in the
gray of this morning, first of December, 1831,--his last free morning.
Noble game is afoot, afoot at last; and all the hunters have him in
their toils.--The guardships gain upon Torrijos; he cannot even reach
Malaga; has to run ashore at a place called Fuengirola, not far from
that city;--the guardships seizing his vessels, so soon as he
is disembarked. The country is all up; troops scouring the coast
everywhere: no possibility of getting into Malaga with a party of
Fifty-five. He takes possession of a farmstead (Ingles, the place is
called); barricades himself there, but is speedily beleaguered with
forces hopelessly superior. He demands to treat; is refused all treaty;
is granted six hours to consider, shall then either surrender at
discretion, or be forced to do it. Of course he _does_ it, having no
alternative; and enters Malaga a prisoner, all his followers prisoners.
Here had the Torrijos Enterprise, and all that was embarked upon it,
finally arrived.

Express is sent to Madrid; express instantly returns; "Military
execution on the instant; give them shriving if they want it; that
done, fusillade them all." So poor Torrijos and his followers, the whole
Fifty-six of them, Robert Boyd included, meet swift death in Malaga.
In such manner rushes down the curtain on them and their affair; they
vanish thus on a sudden; rapt away as in black clouds of fate. Poor
Boyd, Sterling's cousin, pleaded his British citizenship; to no purpose:
it availed only to his dead body, this was delivered to the British
Consul for interment, and only this. Poor Madam Torrijos, hearing,
at Paris where she now was, of her husband's capture, hurries towards
Madrid to solicit mercy; whither also messengers from Lafayette and the
French Government were hurrying, on the like errand: at Bayonne, news
met the poor lady that it was already all over, that she was now a
widow, and her husband hidden from her forever.--Such was the handsel of
the new year 1832 for Sterling in his West-Indian solitudes.


Sterling's friends never heard of these affairs; indeed we were all
secretly warned not to mention the name of Torrijos in his hearing,
which accordingly remained strictly a forbidden subject. His misery over
this catastrophe was known, in his own family, to have been immense. He
wrote to his Brother Anthony: "I hear the sound of that musketry; it is
as if the bullets were tearing my own brain." To figure in one's sick
and excited imagination such a scene of fatal man-hunting, lost valor
hopelessly captured and massacred; and to add to it, that the victims
are not men merely, that they are noble and dear forms known lately
as individual friends: what a Dance of the Furies and wild-pealing
Dead-march is this, for the mind of a loving, generous and vivid man!
Torrijos getting ashore at Fuengirola; Robert Boyd and others ranked
to die on the esplanade at Malaga--Nay had not Sterling, too, been the
innocent yet heedless means of Boyd's embarking in this enterprise? By
his own kinsman poor Boyd had been witlessly guided into the pitfalls.
"I hear the sound of that musketry; it is as if the bullets were tearing
my own brain!"



CHAPTER XIV. PAUSE.

These thoughts dwelt long with Sterling; and for a good while, I fancy,
kept possession of the proscenium of his mind; madly parading there, to
the exclusion of all else,--coloring all else with their own black hues.
He was young, rich in the power to be miserable or otherwise; and this
was his first grand sorrow which had now fallen upon him.

An important spiritual crisis, coming at any rate in some form, had
hereby suddenly in a very sad form come. No doubt, as youth was passing
into manhood in these Tropical seclusions, and higher wants were
awakening in his mind, and years and reflection were adding new insight
and admonition, much in his young way of thought and action lay already
under ban with him, and repentances enough over many things were not
wanting. But here on a sudden had all repentances, as it were, dashed
themselves together into one grand whirlwind of repentance; and his
past life was fallen wholly as into a state of reprobation. A great
remorseful misery had come upon him. Suddenly, as with a sudden
lightning-stroke, it had kindled into conflagration all the ruined
structure of his past life; such ruin had to blaze and flame round
him, in the painfulest manner, till it went out in black ashes. His
democratic philosophies, and mutinous radicalisms, already falling
doomed in his thoughts, had reached their consummation and final
condemnation here. It was all so rash, imprudent, arrogant, all
that; false, or but half true; inapplicable wholly as a rule of noble
conduct;--and it has ended _thus_. Woe on it! Another guidance must be
found in life, or life is impossible!--

It is evident, Sterling's thoughts had already, since the old days of
the "black dragoon," much modified themselves. We perceive that, by mere
increase of experience and length of time, the opposite and much deeper
side of the question, which also has its adamantine basis of truth, was
in turn coming into play; and in fine that a Philosophy of Denial, and
world illuminated merely by the flames of Destruction, could never have
permanently been the resting-place of such a man. Those pilgrimings to
Coleridge, years ago, indicate deeper wants beginning to be felt, and
important ulterior resolutions becoming inevitable for him. If in your
own soul there is any tone of the "Eternal Melodies," you cannot live
forever in those poor outer, transitory grindings and discords; you will
have to struggle inwards and upwards, in search of some diviner home
for yourself!--Coleridge's prophetic moonshine, Torrijos's sad tragedy:
those were important occurrences in Sterling's life. But, on the whole,
there was a big Ocean for him, with impetuous Gulf-streams, and a doomed
voyage in quest of the Atlantis, _before_ either of those arose as
lights on the horizon. As important beacon-lights let us count them
nevertheless;--signal-dates they form to us, at lowest. We may
reckon this Torrijos tragedy the crisis of Sterling's history; the
turning-point, which modified, in the most important and by no means
wholly in the most favorable manner, all the subsequent stages of it.


Old Radicalism and mutinous audacious Ethnicism having thus fallen
to wreck, and a mere black world of misery and remorse now disclosing
itself, whatsoever of natural piety to God and man, whatsoever of pity
and reverence, of awe and devout hope was in Sterling's heart now awoke
into new activity; and strove for some due utterance and predominance.
His Letters, in these months, speak of earnest religious studies and
efforts;--of attempts by prayer and longing endeavor of all kinds, to
struggle his way into the temple, if temple there were, and there find
sanctuary. [10] The realities were grown so haggard; life a field of
black ashes, if there rose no temple anywhere on it! Why, like a fated
Orestes, is man so whipt by the Furies, and driven madly hither and
thither, if it is not even that he may seek some shrine, and there make
expiation and find deliverance?

In these circumstances, what a scope for Coleridge's philosophy, above
all! "If the bottled moonshine _be_ actually substance? Ah, could one
but believe in a Church while finding it incredible! What is faith; what
is conviction, credibility, insight? Can a thing be at once known for
true, and known for false? 'Reason,' 'Understanding:' is there, then,
such an internecine war between these two? It was so Coleridge
imagined it, the wisest of existing men!"--No, it is not an easy matter
(according to Sir Kenelm Digby), this of getting up your "astral spirit"
of a thing, and setting it in action, when the thing itself is well
burnt to ashes. Poor Sterling; poor sons of Adam in general, in this sad
age of cobwebs, worn-out symbolisms, reminiscences and simulacra! Who
can tell the struggles of poor Sterling, and his pathless wanderings
through these things! Long afterwards, in speech with his Brother,
he compared his case in this time to that of "a young lady who has
tragically lost her lover, and is willing to be half-hoodwinked into a
convent, or in any noble or quasi-noble way to escape from a world which
has become intolerable."


During the summer of 1832, I find traces of attempts towards
Anti-Slavery Philanthropy; shadows of extensive schemes in that
direction. Half-desperate outlooks, it is likely, towards the refuge of
Philanthropism, as a new chivalry of life. These took no serious hold
of so clear an intellect; but they hovered now and afterwards as
day-dreams, when life otherwise was shorn of aim;--mirages in the
desert, which are found not to be lakes when you put your bucket into
them. One thing was clear, the sojourn in St. Vincent was not to last
much longer.

Perhaps one might get some scheme raised into life, in Downing Street,
for universal Education to the Blacks, preparatory to emancipating
them? There were a noble work for a man! Then again poor Mrs. Sterling's
health, contrary to his own, did not agree with warm moist climates.
And again, &c. &c. These were the outer surfaces of the measure; the
unconscious pretexts under which it showed itself to Sterling and
was shown by him: but the inner heart and determining cause of it (as
frequently in Sterling's life, and in all our lives) was not these. In
brief, he had had enough of St. Vincent. The strangling oppressions of
his soul were too heavy for him there. Solution lay in Europe, or might
lie; not in these remote solitudes of the sea,--where no shrine or
saint's well is to be looked for, no communing of pious pilgrims
journeying together towards a shrine.



CHAPTER XV. BONN; HERSTMONCEUX.

After a residence of perhaps fifteen months Sterling quitted St.
Vincent, and never returned. He reappeared at his Father's house, to the
joy of English friends, in August, 1832; well improved in health, and
eager for English news; but, beyond vague schemes and possibilities,
considerably uncertain what was next to be done.

After no long stay in this scene,--finding Downing Street dead as stone
to the Slave-Education and to all other schemes,--he went across, with
his wife and child, to Germany; purposing to make not so much a tour
as some loose ramble, or desultory residence in that country, in the
Rhineland first of all. Here was to be hoped the picturesque in scenery,
which he much affected; here the new and true in speculation, which
he inwardly longed for and wanted greatly more; at all events, here as
readily as elsewhere might a temporary household be struck up, under
interesting circumstances.--I conclude he went across in the Spring
of 1833; perhaps directly after _Arthur Coningsby_ had got through the
press. This Novel, which, as we have said, was begun two or three years
ago, probably on his cessation from the _Athenaeum_, and was mainly
finished, I think, before the removal to St. Vincent, had by this time
fallen as good as obsolete to his own mind; and its destination now,
whether to the press or to the fire, was in some sort a matter at once
of difficulty and of insignificance to him. At length deciding for the
milder alternative, he had thrown in some completing touches here
and there,--especially, as I conjecture, a proportion of Coleridgean
moonshine at the end; and so sent it forth.

It was in the sunny days, perhaps in May or June of this year, that
_Arthur Coningsby_ reached my own hand, far off amid the heathy
wildernesses; sent by John Mill: and I can still recollect the pleasant
little episode it made in my solitude there. The general impression it
left on me, which has never since been renewed by a second reading in
whole or in part, was the certain prefigurement to myself, more or
less distinct, of an opulent, genial and sunny mind, but misdirected,
disappointed, experienced in misery;--nay crude and hasty; mistaking for
a solid outcome from its woes what was only to me a gilded vacuity. The
hero an ardent youth, representing Sterling himself, plunges into
life such as we now have it in these anarchic times, with the radical,
utilitarian, or mutinous heathen theory, which is the readiest for
inquiring souls; finds, by various courses of adventure, utter shipwreck
in this; lies broken, very wretched: that is the tragic nodus, or
apogee of his life-course. In this mood of mind, he clutches desperately
towards some new method (recognizable as Coleridge's) of laying hand
again on the old Church, which has hitherto been extraneous and as
if non-extant to his way of thought; makes out, by some Coleridgean
legedermain, that there actually is still a Church for him; that this
extant Church, which he long took for an extinct shadow, is not such,
but a substance; upon which he can anchor himself amid the storms of
fate;--and he does so, even taking orders in it, I think. Such could
by no means seem to me the true or tenable solution. Here clearly,
struggling amid the tumults, was a lovable young fellow-soul; who had
by no means yet got to land; but of whom much might be hoped, if he ever
did. Some of the delineations are highly pictorial, flooded with a
deep ruddy effulgence; betokening much wealth, in the crude or the ripe
state. The hope of perhaps, one day, knowing Sterling, was welcome
and interesting to me. _Arthur Coningsby_, struggling imperfectly in a
sphere high above circulating-library novels, gained no notice whatever
in that quarter; gained, I suppose in a few scattered heads, some such
recognition as the above; and there rested. Sterling never mentioned the
name of it in my hearing, or would hear it mentioned.


In those very days while _Arthur Coningsby_ was getting read amid the
Scottish moors, "in June, 1833," Sterling, at Bonn in the Rhine-country,
fell in with his old tutor and friend, the Reverend Julius Hare; one
with whom he always delighted to communicate, especially on such topics
as then altogether occupied him. A man of cheerful serious character, of
much approved accomplishment, of perfect courtesy; surely of much piety,
in all senses of that word. Mr. Hare had quitted his scholastic labors
and distinctions, some time ago; the call or opportunity for taking
orders having come; and as Rector of Herstmonceux in Sussex, a place
patrimonially and otherwise endeared to him, was about entering, under
the best omens, on a new course of life. He was now on his return from
Rome, and a visit of some length to Italy. Such a meeting could not
but be welcome and important to Sterling in such a mood. They had
much earnest conversation, freely communing on the highest matters;
especially of Sterling's purpose to undertake the clerical profession,
in which course his reverend friend could not but bid him good speed.

It appears, Sterling already intimated his intention to become a
clergyman: He would study theology, biblicalities, perfect himself in
the knowledge seemly or essential for his new course;--read diligently
"for a year or two in some good German University," then seek to obtain
orders: that was his plan. To which Mr. Hare gave his hearty _Euge_;
adding that if his own curacy happened then to be vacant, he should be
well pleased to have Sterling in that office. So they parted.

"A year or two" of serious reflection "in some good German University,"
or anywhere in the world, might have thrown much elucidation upon these
confused strugglings and purposings of Sterling's, and probably have
spared him some confusion in his subsequent life. But the talent of
waiting was, of all others, the one he wanted most. Impetuous velocity,
all-hoping headlong alacrity, what we must call rashness and impatience,
characterized him in most of his important and unimportant procedures;
from the purpose to the execution there was usually but one big leap
with him. A few months after Mr. Hare was gone, Sterling wrote that his
purposes were a little changed by the late meeting at Bonn; that he now
longed to enter the Church straightway: that if the Herstmonceux Curacy
was still vacant, and the Rector's kind thought towards him still held,
he would instantly endeavor to qualify himself for that office.

Answer being in the affirmative on both heads, Sterling returned to
England; took orders,--"ordained deacon at Chichester on Trinity Sunday
in 1834" (he never became technically priest):--and so, having fitted
himself and family with a reasonable house, in one of those leafy lanes
in quiet Herstmonceux, on the edge of Pevensey Level, he commenced the
duties of his Curacy.


The bereaved young lady has _taken_ the veil, then! Even so. "Life is
growing all so dark and brutal; must be redeemed into human, if it will
continue life. Some pious heroism, to give a human color to life again,
on any terms,"--even on impossible ones!

To such length can transcendental moonshine, cast by some morbidly
radiating Coleridge into the chaos of a fermenting life, act magically
there, and produce divulsions and convulsions and diseased developments.
So dark and abstruse, without lamp or authentic finger-post, is the
course of pious genius towards the Eternal Kingdoms grown. No fixed
highway more; the old spiritual highways and recognized paths to the
Eternal, now all torn up and flung in heaps, submerged in unutterable
boiling mud-oceans of Hypocrisy and Unbelievability, of brutal living
Atheism and damnable dead putrescent Cant: surely a tragic pilgrimage
for all mortals; Darkness, and the mere shadow of Death, enveloping all
things from pole to pole; and in the raging gulf-currents, offering us
will-o'-wisps for loadstars,--intimating that there are no stars, nor
ever were, except certain Old-Jew ones which have now gone out. Once
more, a tragic pilgrimage for all mortals; and for the young pious soul,
winged with genius, and passionately seeking land, and passionately
abhorrent of floating carrion withal, more tragical than for any!--A
pilgrimage we must all undertake nevertheless, and make the best of
with our respective means. Some arrive; a glorious few: many must be
lost,--go down upon the floating wreck which they took for land. Nay,
courage! These also, so far as there was any heroism in them, have
bequeathed their life as a contribution to us, have valiantly laid their
bodies in the chasm for us: of these also there is no ray of heroism
_lost_,--and, on the whole, what else of them could or should be "saved"
at any time? Courage, and ever Forward!

Concerning this attempt of Sterling's to find sanctuary in the old
Church, and desperately grasp the hem of her garment in such manner,
there will at present be many opinions: and mine must be recorded here
in flat reproval of it, in mere pitying condemnation of it, as a rash,
false, unwise and unpermitted step. Nay, among the evil lessons of his
Time to poor Sterling, I cannot but account this the worst; properly
indeed, as we may say, the apotheosis, the solemn apology and
consecration, of all the evil lessons that were in it to him. Alas, if
we did remember the divine and awful nature of God's Truth, and had not
so forgotten it as poor doomed creatures never did before,--should we,
durst we in our most audacious moments, think of wedding _it_ to the
World's Untruth, which is also, like all untruths, the Devil's? Only in
the world's last lethargy can such things be done, and accounted safe
and pious! Fools! "Do you think the Living God is a buzzard idol,"
sternly asks Milton, that you dare address Him in this manner?--Such
darkness, thick sluggish clouds of cowardice and oblivious baseness,
have accumulated on us: thickening as if towards the eternal sleep!
It is not now known, what never needed proof or statement before, that
Religion is not a doubt; that it is a certainty,--or else a mockery and
horror. That none or all of the many things we are in doubt about, and
need to have demonstrated and rendered probable, can by any alchemy be
made a "Religion" for us; but are and must continue a baleful, quiet or
unquiet, Hypocrisy for us; and bring--_salvation_, do we fancy? I think,
it is another thing they will bring, and are, on all hands, visibly
bringing this good while!--


The time, then, with its deliriums, has done its worst for poor
Sterling. Into deeper aberration it cannot lead him; this is the
crowning error. Happily, as beseems the superlative of errors, it was
a very brief, almost a momentary one. In June, 1834, Sterling dates as
installed at Herstmonceux; and is flinging, as usual, his whole soul
into the business; successfully so far as outward results could show:
but already in September, he begins to have misgivings; and in February
following, quits it altogether,--the rest of his life being, in great
part, a laborious effort of detail to pick the fragments of it off him,
and be free of it in soul as well as in title.

At this the extreme point of spiritual deflexion and depression, when
the world's madness, unusually impressive on such a man, has done its
very worst with him, and in all future errors whatsoever he will be a
little less mistaken, we may close the First Part of Sterling's Life.




PART II.




CHAPTER I. CURATE.

By Mr. Hare's account, no priest of any Church could more fervently
address himself to his functions than Sterling now did. He went about
among the poor, the ignorant, and those that had need of help; zealously
forwarded schools and beneficences; strove, with his whole might, to
instruct and aid whosoever suffered consciously in body, or still worse
unconsciously in mind. He had charged himself to make the Apostle Paul
his model; the perils and voyagings and ultimate martyrdom of Christian
Paul, in those old ages, on the great scale, were to be translated into
detail, and become the practical emblem of Christian Sterling on the
coast of Sussex in this new age. "It would be no longer from Jerusalem
to Damascus," writes Sterling, "to Arabia, to Derbe, Lystra, Ephesus,
that he would travel: but each house of his appointed Parish would be
to him what each of those great cities was,--a place where he would bend
his whole being, and spend his heart for the conversion, purification,
elevation of those under his influence. The whole man would be
forever at work for this purpose; head, heart, knowledge, time, body,
possessions, all would be directed to this end." A high enough model
set before one:--how to be realized!--Sterling hoped to realize it, to
struggle towards realizing it, in some small degree. This is Mr. Hare's
report of him:--

"He was continually devising some fresh scheme for improving the
condition of the Parish. His aim was to awaken the minds of the
people, to arouse their conscience, to call forth their sense of moral
responsibility, to make them feel their own sinfulness, their need of
redemption, and thus lead them to a recognition of the Divine Love by
which that redemption is offered to us. In visiting them he was diligent
in all weathers, to the risk of his own health, which was greatly
impaired thereby; and his gentleness and considerate care for the sick
won their affection; so that, though his stay was very short, his name
is still, after a dozen years, cherished by many."

How beautiful would Sterling be in all this; rushing forward like a host
towards victory; playing and pulsing like sunshine or soft lightning;
busy at all hours to perform his part in abundant and superabundant
measure! "Of that which it was to me personally," continues Mr. Hare,
"to have such a fellow-laborer, to live constantly in the freest
communion with such a friend, I cannot speak. He came to me at a time of
heavy affliction, just after I had heard that the Brother, who had
been the sharer of all my thoughts and feelings from childhood, had bid
farewell to his earthly life at Rome; and thus he seemed given to me to
make up in some sort for him whom I had lost. Almost daily did I look
out for his usual hour of comin

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