able babblement that day with an
accuracy above all other men."

The younger Sterling, Carlyle's friend, was at Cambridge for a time,
but never took his degree; he became a journalist, wrote a novel,
tales, plays, endless poems--all of thin and vapid quality. His brief
life, for he died at thirty-eight, was a much disquieted one; he
travelled about in search of health, for he was early threatened with
consumption; for a short time he was a curate in the English Church,
but drifted away from that. He lived for a time at Falmouth, and
afterwards at Ventnor. He must have been a man of extraordinary charm,
and with quite unequalled powers of conversation. Even Carlyle seems to
have heard him gladly, and that is no ordinary compliment, considering
Carlyle's own volubility, and the agonies, occasionally suppressed but
generally trenchantly expressed, with which Carlyle listened to other
well-known talkers like Coleridge and Macaulay.

Carlyle certainly had a very deep affection and admiration for
Sterling; he rains down praises upon him, in that wonderful little
biography, which is probably the finest piece of work that Carlyle ever
did.

He speaks of Sterling as "brilliant, beautiful, cheerful with an
ever-flowing wealth of ideas, fancies, imaginations . . . with 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."

But all Carlyle's love and admiration for his friend did not induce him
to praise Sterling's writings; he looked upon him as a poet, but
without the gift of expression. He says that all Sterling's work was
spoilt by over-haste, and "a lack of due inertia." The fact is that
Sterling was a sort of improvisatore, and what was beautiful and
natural enough when poured out in talk, and with the stimulus of
congenial company, grew pale and indistinct when he wrote it down; he
had, in fact, no instinct for art or for design, and he failed whenever
he tried to mould ideas into form.

The shadow of illness darkened about him, and he spent long periods in
prostrate seclusion, tended by his wife and children, unable to write
or talk or receive his friends. Then a terrible calamity befell him.
His mother, to whom he was devotedly attached, died after a long
illness, Sterling not being allowed to go to her, or to leave his own
sick-room. He received the news one morning by le