ven shrinking from his doom, makes it
in its noble simplicity one of the finest "last words" that I have ever
read, and finer, I verily believe, than any flight of poetical
imagination.

A few days later he sent Carlyle some stanzas of verse, "written," says
Carlyle, "as if in star-fire and immortal tears; which are among my
sacred possessions, to be kept for myself alone."

A few weeks before he wrote his last letter to Carlyle, Sterling had
written a letter to his son, who was then a boy at school in London. In
that he says:

"When I fancy how you are walking in the same streets, and moving along
the same river, that I used to watch so intently, as if in a dream,
when younger than you are--I could gladly burst into tears, not of
grief, but with a feeling that there is no name for. Everything is so
wonderful, great and holy, so sad and yet not bitter, so full of Death
and so bordering on Heaven. Can you understand anything of this? If you
can, you will begin to know what a serious matter our Life is; how
unworthy and stupid it is to trifle it away without heed; what a
wretched, insignificant, worthless creature anyone comes to be, who
does not as soon as possible bend his whole strength, as in stringing a
stiff bow, to doing whatever task lies first before him."

That again is a noble letter; but over it I think there lies a little
shadow of regret, a sense that he had himself wasted some of the force
of life in vague trifling; but even that mood had passed away in the
nearness of the great impending change, leaving him upborne upon the
greatness of God, in deep wonder and hope, knowing nothing more, in his
weariness and his suffering, but the calmness of the Eternal Will.

XV

INSTINCTIVE FEAR

The fears then from which men suffer, and even the greatest men not
least, seem to be strangely complicated by the fact that nature does
not seem to work as fast in the physical world as in the mental world.
The mosquitoes of South American swamps are all fitted with a perfect
tool-box of implements for piercing the hides of warm-blooded animals
and drawing blood, although warm-blooded animals have long ceased to
exist in those localities. But as the mosquito is one of the few
creatures which can propagate its kind without ever partaking of food,
the mosquito has therefore not died out; and though for many
generations billions upon billions of mosquitoes have never had a
chance of doing what they seem born