Eliot.

All her writings are now before the world, and are accessible to all.
They have taken their place, and will keep their place, high among the
writings of those of our age who have made that age illustrious in the
history of the English tongue.

THE ESSAYS OF "GEORGE ELIOT."

I. CARLYLE'S LIFE OF STERLING.

As soon as the closing of the Great Exhibition afforded a reasonable hope
that there would once more be a reading public, "The Life of Sterling"
appeared. A new work by Carlyle must always be among the literary births
eagerly chronicled by the journals and greeted by the public. In a book
of such parentage we care less about the subject than about its
treatment, just as we think the "Portrait of a Lord" worth studying if it
come from the pencil of a Vandyck. The life of John Sterling, however,
has intrinsic interest, even if it be viewed simply as the struggle of a
restless aspiring soul, yearning to leave a distinct impress of itself on
the spiritual development of humanity, with that fell disease which, with
a refinement of torture, heightens the susceptibility and activity of the
faculties, while it undermines their creative force. Sterling, moreover,
was a man thoroughly in earnest, to whom poetry and philosophy were not
merely another form of paper currency or a ladder to fame, but an end in
themselves--one of those finer spirits with whom, amid the jar and hubbub
of our daily life,

"The melodies abide
Of the everlasting chime."

But his intellect was active and rapid, rather than powerful, and in all
his writings we feel the want of a stronger electric current to give that
vigor of conception and felicity of expression, by which we distinguish
the undefinable something called genius; while his moral nature, though
refined and elevated, seems to have been subordinate to his intellectual
tendencies and social qualities, and to have had itself little
determining influence on his life. His career was less exceptional than
his character: a youth marked by delicate health and studious tastes, a
short-lived and not very successful share in the management of the
_Athenaeum_, a fever of sympathy with Spanish patriots, arrested before
it reached a dangerous crisis by an early love affair ending in marriage,
a fifteen months' residence in the West Indies, eight months of curate's
duty at Herstmonceux, relinquished on the ground of failing health, and
through his remaining years