t
hide anything sinister, if such there had been to hide. A more perfectly
transparent soul I have never known. It was beautiful, to read all those
interior movements; the little shades of affectations, ostentations;
transient spurts of anger, which never grew to the length of settled
spleen: all so naive, so childlike, the very faults grew beautiful to
you.

And so he played his part among us, and has now ended it: in this first
half of the Nineteenth Century, such was the shape of human destinies
the world and he made out between them. He sleeps now, in the little
burying-ground of Bonchurch; bright, ever-young in the memory of others
that must grow old; and was honorably released from his toils before the
hottest of the day.

All that remains, in palpable shape, of John Sterling's activities in
this world are those Two poor Volumes; scattered fragments gathered from
the general waste of forgotten ephemera by the piety of a friend: an
inconsiderable memorial; not pretending to have achieved greatness;
only disclosing, mournfully, to the more observant, that a promise of
greatness was there. Like other such lives, like all lives, this is a
tragedy; high hopes, noble efforts; under thickening difficulties and
impediments, ever-new nobleness of valiant effort;--and the result
death, with conquests by no means corresponding. A life which cannot
challenge the world's attention; yet which does modestly solicit it, and
perhaps on clear study will be found to reward it.

On good evidence let the world understand that here was a remarkable
soul born into it; who, more than others, sensible to its influences,
took intensely into him such tint and shape of feature as the world had
to offer there and then; fashioning himself eagerly by whatsoever of
noble presented itself; participating ardently in the world's battle,
and suffering deeply in its bewilderments;--whose Life-pilgrimage
accordingly is an emblem, unusually significant, of the world's own
during those years of his. A man of infinite susceptivity; who caught
everywhere, more than others, the color of the element he lived in, the
infection of all that was or appeared honorable, beautiful and manful in
the tendencies of his Time;--whose history therefore is, beyond others,
emblematic of that of his Time.

In Sterling's Writings and Actions, were they capable of being well
read, we consider that there is for all true hearts, and especially for
young noble seekers, a