In spite of these wanderings,Sterling's course in life,so far as his poor life could have any course or aim beyond that of screening itself from swift death,was getting more and more clear to him;and he pursued it diligently,in the only way permitted him,by hasty snatches,in the intervals of continual fluctuation,change of place and other interruption.
Such,once for all,were the conditions appointed him.And it must be owned he had,with a most kindly temper,adjusted himself to these;nay you would have said,he loved them;it was almost as if he would have chosen them as the suitablest.Such an adaptation was there in him of volition to necessity:--for indeed they both,if well seen into,proceeded from one source.Sterling's bodily disease was the expression,under physical conditions,of the too vehement life which,under the moral,the intellectual and other aspects,incessantly struggled within him.Too vehement;--which would have required a frame of oak and iron to contain it:in a thin though most wiry body of flesh and bone,it incessantly "wore holes,"and so found outlet for itself.He could take no rest,he had never learned that art;he was,as we often reproached him,fatally incapable of sitting still.
Rapidity,as of pulsing auroras,as of dancing lightnings:rapidity in all forms characterized him.This,which was his bane,in many senses,being the real origin of his disorder,and of such continual necessity to move and change,--was also his antidote,so far as antidote there might be;enabling him to love change,and to snatch,as few others could have done,from the waste chaotic years,all tumbled into ruin by incessant change,what hours and minutes of available turned up.He had an incredible facility of labor.He flashed with most piercing glance into a subject;gathered it up into organic utterability,with truly wonderful despatch,considering the success and truth attained;and threw it on paper with a swift felicity,ingenuity,brilliancy and general excellence,of which,under such conditions of swiftness,I have never seen a parallel.
Essentially an _improviser_genius;as his Father too was,and of admirable completeness he too,though under a very different form.
If Sterling has done little in Literature,we may ask,What other man than he,in such circumstances,could have done anything?In virtue of these rapid faculties,which otherwise cost him so dear,he has built together,out of those wavering boiling quicksands of his few later years,a result which may justly surprise us.There is actually some result in those poor Two Volumes gathered from him,such as they are;he that reads there will not wholly lose his time,nor rise with a malison instead of a blessing on the writer.Here actually is a real seer-glance,of some compass,into the world of our day;blessed glance,once more,of an eye that is human;truer than one of a thousand,and beautifully capable of making others see with it.Ihave known considerable temporary reputations gained,considerable piles of temporary guineas,with loud reviewing and the like to match,on a far less basis than lies in those two volumes.Those also,Iexpect,will be held in memory by the world,one way or other,till the world has extracted all its benefit from them.Graceful,ingenious and illuminative reading,of their sort,for all manner of inquiring souls.A little verdant flowery island of poetic intellect,of melodious human verity;sunlit island founded on the rocks;--which the enormous circumambient continents of mown reed-grass and floating lumber,with _their_mountain-ranges of ejected stable-litter however alpine,cannot by any means or chance submerge:nay,I expect,they will not even quite hide it,this modest little island,from the well-discerning;but will float past it towards the place appointed for them,and leave said island standing._Allah kereem_,say the Arabs!And of the English also some still know that there is a,difference in the material of mountains!--As it is this last little result,the amount of his poor and ever-interrupted literary labor,that henceforth forms the essential history of Sterling,we need not dwell at too much length on the foreign journeys,disanchorings,and nomadic vicissitudes of household,which occupy his few remaining years,and which are only the disastrous and accidental arena of this.He had now,excluding his early and more deliberate residence in the West Indies,made two flights abroad,once with his family,once without,in search of health.He had two more,in rapid succession,to make,and many more to meditate;and in the whole from Bayswater to the end,his family made no fewer than five complete changes of abode,for his sake.But these cannot be accepted as in any sense epochs in his life:the one last epoch of his life was that of his internal change towards Literature as his work in the world;and we need not linger much on these,which are the mere outer accidents of that,and had no distinguished influence in modifying that.
