obstacle to the wind, which must, however, I think have
been in itself more furious than with us. No other island has suffered
considerably.

"I have told both my Uncle and Anthony that I have given you the details
of our recent history;--which are not so pleasant that I should wish to
write them again. Perhaps you will be good enough to let them see this,
as soon as you and my Father can spare it.... I am ever, dearest Mother,

"Your grateful and affectionate
"JOHN STERLING."

This Letter, I observe, is dated 28th August, 1831; which is otherwise a
day of mark to the world and me,--the Poet Goethe's last birthday. While
Sterling sat in the Tropical solitudes, penning this history, little
European Weimar had its carriages and state-carriages busy on the
streets, and was astir with compliments and visiting-cards, doing its
best, as heretofore, on behalf of a remarkable day; and was not, for
centuries or tens of centuries, to see the like of it again!--

At Brighton, the hospitable home of those Munros, our friends continued
for above two months. Their first child, Edward, as above noticed, was
born here, "14th October, 1831;"--and now the poor lady, safe from all
her various perils, could return to Colonarie under good auspices.

It was in this year that I first heard definitely of Sterling as a
contemporary existence; and laid up some note and outline of him in my
memory, as of one whom I might yet hope to know. John Mill, Mrs. Austin
and perhaps other friends, spoke of him with great affection and much
pitying admiration; and hoped to see him home again, under better omens,
from over the seas. As a gifted amiable being, of a certain radiant
tenuity and velocity, too thin and rapid and diffusive, in danger of
dissipating himself into the vague, or alas into death itself: it was
so that, like a spot of bright colors, rather than a portrait with
features, he hung occasionally visible in my imagination.

CHAPTER XIII. A CATASTROPHE.

The ruin of his house had hardly been repaired, when there arrived out
of Europe tidings which smote as with a still more fatal hurricane on
the four corners of his inner world, and awoke all the old thunders that
lay asleep on his horizon there. Tidings, at last of a decisive nature,
from Gibraltar and the Spanish democrat adventure. This is what the
Newspapers had to report--the catastrophe at once, the det