LIFE AND REMAINS OF JOHN STERLING.* The gifted person of whom Archdeacon Hare has drawn so pleasing a portrait was born at Kames Castle, in the Isle of Bute, July 20, 1806, from whence his parents removed to Llanblithian, in Glamorganshire, a region of much beauty and interest, where they resided four years. Sterling has touchingly described the influence of these scenes upon his childish feelings,-"There are places that I love more for the persons I have known in them; but still they are places, externals, accidents. That green, silent valley, with its baby brooklet, is very differently infused and incorporated in me; its grass, to me the symbol and archetype of all verdure and tranquillity, a spiritual, not material thing. For it was from these objects that I learned to read and love the essential forms of Nature and Life." In the autumn of 1814, when the war-storm had cleared away, Sterling's family went over to France, and took up their abode at Passy. They were enjoying the quiet of the place and the novelties of continental life, when the sudden return of Napoleon again convulsed the country. Escaping with some difficulty, and more alarm, in the following year they settled in London. The health of John, always a tender and delicate child, did not enable him to undergo a regular and protracted course of instruction. His parents watched each little interval of sunshine, and made the most of it, casting in a handful of seed as opportunity served. His schools, accordingly, were often changed. But, in all this rough and uncertain weather, the plant grew, and put forth leaves and bloom. In his eleventh year the literary faculty showed itself in a charming manner. He had a younger brother, Edward, to whom he was devotedly attached, and who had been taken home on account of illness. John turned over in his mind how he might contribute to his brother's amusement during his sickness, and, recollecting his fondness for tales, "he made a book by folding up a sheet of paper to the size of half a card, and on these tiny pages began to write out the story of Valentine and Orson, after a version of his own." To render the resemblance more striking he employed Roman letters. His affectionate toil proved to be unavailing, for little Edward was sinking too rapidly to regard it. The death of his brother left a solemn impression on the mind Essays and Tales, by John Sterling; Collected and Edited, with a Memoir of his Life, by Julius Charles Hare, M. A., Rector of Herstmonceux. 2 vols. post 8vo. John W. Parker, West Strand. 1818. and memory of John, which years did not efface. He used to say to himself, "Edward is near me now. Edward is watching me. He knows what I am doing and thinking; is sad for my faults. I must, I will strive to do what he would approve of." This feeling has been often recognized in riper and thoughtfuller years, but seldom obtains so early a manifestation. Having gone up to Cambridge in 1824, and commenced his residence at Trinity, Sterling became a pupil of Archdeacon Hare, at that time one of the classical lecturers of the college, by whom his fine taste and generous disposition were quickly observed. This appreciation on one side and high respect on the other gradually expanded, and ripened into a friendship that braved the inclemency of later years. The pupil found more to love in the tutor than in the system. The remarks of his biographer on this subject are recommended by force and candor. He acknowledges the cramped and cramping course of education imposed by the University, and the general want in eminent men of any filial affection towards the intellectual mother of their youth. From Milton down to Gray, and from Gray to the present hour, the sentiment has prevailed, and is likely to continue, while mathematical book-work and Greek and Latin "cram" are the only attainments, for which the Muses of Camus weave or offer crowns. Even when a true scholar appears, he is generally deficient in catholic taste. Porson considered the study of Pindar a mere waste of time; the dullest chorus excelled his noblest ode. Sterling's academic career was profitable to him from outward and independent causes. He gained friends if not honors, and to some of them he continued bound through life. When he came to London, he found one remarkable person rising into fame, who was destined to influence, for good and evil, and in a very wide circumference, some of the noblest spirits of the age. This was Coleridge, whose Aids to Reflection-his most remarkable book—had not long been published. We speak of his influence as being of a chequered description. Arnold indirectly alludes to the large rents in the poet's character when writing to his nephew:-"What a great man your uncle was,- that is, intellectually; for something, I suppose, must have been wanting to hinder us from calling him a great man, ἁπλῶς. Sterling seized the first opportunity of "seeking out the old man in his oracular shrine at Highgate;" and the archdeacon thinks that he might, with happiness beyond any competitor, have preserved to us the ever varying hues, sparkling lights, and what he calls the oceanic ebb and flow of the master's conversation. The short specimen contained in these volumes leaves a relish on the car and memory. Before we listen to the speaker, a sketch of his appearance may be acceptable : Mr. Coleridge is not tall, and rather stout; his features, though not regular, are by no means disagreeable; the hair quite gray; the eye and forehead very fine. His appearance is rather old-fashioned, and he looks as if he belonged not so much to this or to any age as to history. His manner and address struck me as being rather formally courteous. He always speaks in the tone and in the gesture of common conversation, and laughs a good deal, but gently. His emphasis, though not declamatory, is placed with remarkable propriety. He speaks, perhaps, rather slowly, but never stops, and seldom even hesitates. There is the strongest appearance of conviction, without any violence in his manner. His language is sometimes harsh, sometimes careless, often quaint, almost always, I think, drawn from the fresh, delicious fountains of our older eloquence. He adds a little further on, that it was painful to observe in the poet's eye, a glare, half-unearthly, half-morbid, while his cheek showed a flush of over-excitement. We are enabled to illustrate this melancholy indication of the inward fire, by a much earlier letter of John Foster, who heard one of Coleridge's lectures at Bristol. The impression he made on the vigorous mind of Foster, seems to have been singularly deep and lasting; coming up to the highest imaginary standard of genius. He speaks significantly of the luxury of his conversation; and, perhaps that word gives the liveliest description of the wonderful monologue, which flowed from his lips in an unceasing stream. On another occasion Foster called him the prince of magicians. : Luther was a favorite theme of Coleridge, and he always treated it with affectionate eloquence :— Mr. Coleridge happened to lay his hand upon a little old engraving of Luther, with four German verses above it. He said, "How much better this is than many of the butcher-like portraits of Luther, which we commonly see! He is of all men the one whom I especially love and admire." Pointing to the first words of the German verses, he explained them, Luther, the dear hero. "It is singular (he said), how all men have agreed in assigning to Luther the heroic character; and indeed it is certainly most just. Luther, however wrong in some of his opinions, was always right in design and spirit. In translating his ideas into conceptions, he always understood something higher and more universal than he had the means of expressing. He did not bestow too much attention on one part of man's nature to the exclusion of the others; but gave its due place to each,- the intellectual, the practical, and so forth. He is great, even where he is wrong, even in the sacramental controversy, the most unhappy in which he engaged; for his idea of Christ's body becoming infinite by its union with the Godhead, is enHe said, "Calvin was undoubtedly a man of tirely wrong." Some one mentioned Calvin. talent; I have a great respect for him; he had a very logical intellect; but he wanted Luther's powers." He then began to speak of landscape gardening, in consequence of some remark about the beautiful view behind the house in which he resides. "We have gone too far in destroying the old style of gardens and parks. There was a great deal of comfort in the thick hedges, which always gave you a sheltered walk during winter. There is certainly a propriety in the gradual passing away of the works of man in the neighbourhood of a home. The great thing is to discover whether the scenery is such that the country seems to belong to man, or man to the country. Now among the lakes of Westmoreland man evidently belongs to the country: the very cottages seem merely to rise out of, and to be growths of, the rock. But the case is different in a country where every thing speaks of man, houses, corn-fields, cattle. There your improvements ought to be in conformity with the charligence, that where he is not intelligent enough acter of the place. Man is so in love with intelto discover it, he will impress it. Some of the finest views about here (Highgate), are only to be seen from among the most wretched habitations. A recent writer, of whose anonymous authority we know not the value, furnishes a pleasant sketch of a first visit to the same philosopher's hermitage at Highgate "The bees that clustered round his lips (no doubt) in infancy, could not, however, have deposited sweets inexhaustible; and the vast flow of his eloquence hence sometimes brawled roughly among metaphysical rocks of the strangest form, or wandered away fairly out of the sight of vulgar, mortal, intellectual eyes. As to any interjected obstacle that Sterling had the courage to think and say, his hearer might venture to edge in a sug that Johnson's talk, though better balanced and gested flaw in his argument, or doubt to be re-scrubbed, and more ponderous in epithets, wantsolved - caused not a ripple. He smiled, ges-ed not only the flavor and fragrance, but the ticulated seeming assent (with too much an air of adult indulgence to innocent child's prattle), Pen and Pencil Sketches, p. 133. 3. Wasting a fortune is evaporation by a thousand imperceptible means. If it were a stream, be said he had hopes of winning. Were he they'd stop it. Were he a gamester, it would bankrupt in trade, he might have grown rich; but he has neither spirit to spend, nor resolution to spare. He does not spend fast enough to have pleasure from it. He has the crime of If a man is killed in a duel, he is killed as many prodigality, and the wretchedness of parsimony. a one has been killed; but it is a sad thing for a man to lie down and die, to bleed to death, because he has not fortitude enough to sear the wound, or even to stitch it up. genius and knowledge which animated Cole- | is a shuttlecock; if it be struck only at one ridge's. That one was a house of brick, and the end of the room, it will soon fall to the ground. other of jasper. We should not be much in- To keep it up, it must be struck at both ends. clined to quarrel with the last definition; because Johnson was essentially practical, and adapted his sayings to the comfort, convenience, and decoration of life. So that a fine old Elizabethan mansion of gray brick, weather-beaten and stained by time, with its warm rooms, its twilight of dim windows, its massiveness and security, supplies no inexpressive or unpleasing emblem. But we deny the inferiority altogether. Where is it to be found? Was it in literary knowledge? Windham, a most accomplished judge, believed Johnson to have had the largest acquaintance with books possessed by any man in Europe; and an acquaintance chiefly obtained by the practice he recommended to others, of always having a book in his pocket, to read at "by-times;" and going about with eyes open, wits awake, and tongue ready. Was it in observation of life, and searching scrutiny into the motives and dealings of men? Every page of his recorded sayings looks like a quotation from some Christian Epictetus. Was it in sarcasm or that enchiridion of a picturesque wit, which is the most attractive manifestation of humour? But where has Coleridge said any thing equal to the reply to a physician, who sought to recall himself to Johnson's memory by mentioning the splendor of the coat he wore on a particular occasion? "Sir, had you been dipped in Pactolus I should not have noticed you." Was it even in that brilliancy of figurative diction which encircles the image or illustration with a framework of splendor? We will insert these specimens; not looked after with any anxious eye, but immediately recurring to the memory, and set them unhesitatingly against any parallel passages to be drawn from the Table-Talk of Coleridge. The first aim of language is to communicate our thoughts; the second, to do it with despatch. The remark is Tooke's. The conversation of Johnson explains it. What he says, he says quickly. But look at the richness and variety of the language employed, each word being a picture, as we have occasion to observe in Shakspeare:— 1. This petitioning is a new mode of distressing government. There must be no yielding to encourage this. The object is not important enough. We are not to blow up half-a-dozen palaces, because one cottage is burning. 2. It is advantageous to an author that his book should be attacked, as well as praised. Fame Foster, without intending or thinking of it, laid his finger on the true mark of difference between the two Sams of Highgate and Bolt Court; when, contrasting Coleridge with Robert Hall, he said that the poet carried on his mental operations at a distance, while the preacher worked his machinery close by you, so as to endanger the being caught and torn by any of the wheels. This was really the case, and in a much higher degree, with Johnson. The streams of imagination, learning, and eloquence poured down, not as in Coleridge, to overflow and inundate the argument, but to turn a mill and grind corn. Coleridge very seldom did this. The hunger of the soul was unsatisfied. He fed the eye and ear, rather than the understanding. This sense of uncertainty affects the reader of his remains. He succeeds in separating and individualizing few objects. The way cannot be found for the haze; and while all is luminous, there is little light. At a later period, Sterling had the advantage of meeting Mr. Wordsworth, of whom he speaks with much affection, as preserving in age the companionable sympathies of earlier and more joyous life. The parallel suggested with his celebrated friend is very interesting. His conversation is admitted to be distinguished chiefly by delicate taste, good sense, and masculine language. We remember that when the late Mr. Wilberforce visited the Lakes many years ago, he thought the poet of Rydal "independent even to rudeness." And there is extant a curious letter from Southey to Taylor of Norwich, inviting him to come and "mountaineer” for a few weeks, which appears to take a similar, though more playful view, of the venerable laureate's robust and uncompromising character. He tells Taylor that Wordsworth, "the wildest of all wild beasts," will be ready to greet him. After residing one year at Trinity College, Sterling migrated to Trinity Hall, with the intention of proceeding in law; but he left the University without taking a degree. Several subsequent years were spent in London, in the turmoil and fever of literary exertion. In 1828 he was a large contributor to the Athenæum, and helped to raise it in tone and feeling. In this work his 'Shades of the Dead,' 'Travels of Elbert,' and various tales, appeared. As the compositions of a youth of twenty-two, they are certainly remarkable. At the same time he was conscious of the hurtful influences of periodical writing on an immature intellect, drying up and exhausting the root, and, by its very heat, destroying the freshness and verdure of the imagination, and dwarfing its growth. We After a visit to France, and some rather absurd adventures in Spanish politics, Sterling married, in 1830, Susannah, the eldest daughter of Lieutenant-General Barton; and soon after, in consequence of some pulmonary symptoms, sailed to the West Indies. He happened to be at St. Vincent when the hurricane ravaged the island in 1831. He was at this time turning his thoughts towards the Church. His philosophical opinions had assumed, we are told, a more theological and practical character. He attributed his spiritual improvement to three causes, sufficiently singular and discordant, his marriage, Coleridge, and Edward Irving. should scarcely have been prepared to receive a candidate for the ministry from such training. But the unfavorable impression is diminished by this interesting confession,-" Aided by these, disciplined by many grave events, and not, I trust, unguided by the Holy Spirit, I have begun of late to read the Bible with diligence and unfailing interest, and have in some degree learnt by experience the power and advantage of prayer, and enjoy what I never knew before, and what even now is chequered with many fears- a — a lively and increasing hope that I may be able to overcome the world." In this cheering temper of mind he was found by Archdeacon Hare at Bonn, in the summer of 1833, and the interview led to his ordination at Chichester, in the following year, to the curacy of Herstmonceux, in Sussex. 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 my 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 at his usual hour for coming to me, and watch his tall slender form walking rapidly across the hill in front of my window, with the assurance that he was coming to cheer and brighten, to rouse and stir me, to call me up to some height of feeling, or down into some depth of thought. His lively spirit responding instantaneously to every impulse of nature or of art, his generous ardor in behalf of whatever is noble and true, his scorn of all meanness, of all false pretences and conventional beliefs, softened as it was by compassion for the victims of those besetting sins of a cultivated age, his never-flagging impetuosity in pushing onward to some unattained point of duty or of knowledge, along with his gentle, almost reverential, affectionateness towards his former tutor, rendered my intercourse with him an unspeakable blessing; and time after time has it seemed to me that his visit had been like a shower of rain, bringing down freshness and brightness on a dusty roadside hedge. By him, too, the recollection of these our daily meetings was cherished till the last. In a letter to his eldest boy, who was at school, and to whom he used to write daily, about two months before his death, after speaking of various flowers in his garden, especially of some gum cistuses, he says; "I think I like them chiefly because I remember through which one passed into Mr. Hare's libraa large bush of the kind, close to the greenhouse ry. The ground used to be all white with the fallen flowers. I have so often stood near it, talking to him, and looking away over the Pevensey Level to the huge old Roman Castle, and the sea, and Beachy Head beyond. The thought of the happy hours I have so spent in talking with him is and always will be very pleasant." This was the sunniest and fruitfullest season in the life of Sterling. He had a central light for his busy thoughts to move round; and the sad and bewildering dreams of later years had scarcely, if at all, begun to cast their shadows. The only mournful circumstance connected with this page of his life is the brevity of it. He put his hand to the plough in June, 1834, and went struggling through his appointed and promising field of labor until February in the following year, when he was obliged to seek medical advice in London. The opinion of his physician forbade all public exertion; and at the churchdoors of that romantic village" the one Sabbath of his life" might be truly said to have closed. He continued to reside at Herstmonceux until the autumn of 1835, when he took a house at Bayswater. In the absence of his good genius, the speculative character of his mind rapidly developed itself. Essays on God, and Sin, and Inspiration, and Prophecy, grew up too rapidly beneath his pen; and the more he descended into the Old Testament, the more unstable its divine foundation became in his troubled and disordered eyes. We are informed that the great Christian'idea that now engaged and oppressed him was that of Sin, and the consequent necessity of Redemption. His letters constantly recur to it as to the black and dreadful mystery that most appalled him -the precipice that he chiefly loved, with a sickening and ghastly curiosity, to hang over. It was his melancholy fortune to fall among those authors to whose daring footsteps the perilous gaps and declivities of this precipice are familiar, - explorers of God's secrets, who swing themselves down by a twig, and fearlessly gather a rank, starving weed, here and there. It is a “dreadful trade" beyond any that the poet ever imagined. Sterling appears to have been haunted by the strange relationship of faith and works, or, as he calls it, the wicked fiction of our having claims against God, on the principle of good deeds meriting certain returns. We do not presume to touch, in a few paragraphs, an argument, of which the channels of folios have been found insufficient to convey the many turbid and discolored streams. Nor are these columns the fit arena for a controversy, already flaming up in the Apostolic age; and which eighteen hundred years have only helped to feed. But it may be profitable to refer the reader to a discourse by Donne (Matt. v. 16), where the whole question is investigated with the skill and animation of that superb preacher; perhaps the most thoughtfully eloquent and suggestive in the entire circuit of our theology. tinually making itself heard. He rejoiced in the Bishop of London's noble project to build fifty churches — a work now nearly completed — and longed to see it taken up and pressed to the heart in the spirit of an old crusade, not as a paltry calculating adjustment of pounds and shillings, but with all the generosity and selfabandonment of faith and charity. I wish men could be persuaded to take it up one man give in the spirit of the Crusaders, his plate, another his horses, a third his superfluous books, and so forth; and that every man who cares for Christianity, or even for the diffusion of the faith that men are not beasts, would remember how little any outward sacrifice is compared with the object of raising mankind, and one's self with them, out of the world of dreams and sensations into the region of the Universal and Personal. Of course no heaps of bricks, or the incomes attaching to them by way of souls, can do this without a deepening and refining of life and affection on those who minister at the new altars. Still, I am sure, that this latter and higher life will be helped to fulfilment, instead of being retarded, by the outward means. His desire for the improved education of the clergy was also warm and enlightened. Archdeacon Hare dwells on this period of his friend's life with affectionate interest; not only because it was marked by richer fruits of friendly intercourse and confidence, but because the intellectual engine worked with a vigor it never afterwards attained. For the same reason we linger on the scene with a patient and loving eye. The stream was soon to wind into a drearier country; and the church steeple to rise seldomer above the thick trees and mist of German philosophy. In the spring of 1836, his consumptive symptoms put on a more alarming aspect; and as work was interdicted, he spent large portions of each day upon his sofa, "reading all manner of idlenesses." Pindar he looked at with deep reverence, for he thought that the old Theban would have been a grand prophet if he had been born in Judæa, - Herodotus, Thucydides, and Philip de Comines, helped to Sterling's growing liberalism was amusing in its expansive benevolence of interpretation. In reading the Koran he began to doubt the propriety of regarding Mahomet as an impostor; looked upon him as an Arabian Socrates writing his lessons with the sword, and believing himself to hold a divine commission. Those who remember the recent beatification of Cromwell, and how the usurping regicide has been illuminated into the heroic saint, will find their aston-people his solitude: ishment considerably subdued. For our own parts, we consider the former theory to be much more admissible than the latter; yet both, perhaps, lead to consequences more serious than the unthinking might anticipate. They are trains of fire, running under ground; of which the work and the end are only known by the explo sion and overthrow of the national creeds which they demolish. The massiveness of the structure shows the ruinous force of the agent. In the midst of these and other similar weaknesses of judgment, the voice of his holier nature was con I own that I cannot conceive any grounds for comparing Herodotus, as a deep and comprehensive intellect, with Thucydides. But the Ionian, by his childlike receptivity, catches many traits of human nature, which Thucydides would overlook. By the way, look at the story of Rhamp sinitus in the second Book, and see if it is not precisely in the manner of the Arabian Nights. No doubt, as told to Herodotus, it had the dramatic filling up, which is all it wants. He was probably ignorant that Coleridge had already assigned a Greek origin to the Arabian |