in a body that could
have held it without breaking, to have gone far, even under the unstable
guidance it was like to have!

Thus, too, an extensive, very variegated circle of connections was
forming round him. Besides his _Athenaeum_ work, and evenings in Regent
Street and elsewhere, he makes visits to country-houses, the Bullers'
and others; converses with established gentlemen, with honorable women
not a few; is gay and welcome with the young of his own age; knows also
religious, witty, and other distinguished ladies, and is admiringly
known by them. On the whole, he is already locomotive; visits hither
and thither in a very rapid flying manner. Thus I find he had made one
flying visit to the Cumberland Lake-region in 1828, and got sight of
Wordsworth; and in the same year another flying one to Paris, and seen
with no undue enthusiasm the Saint-Simonian Portent just beginning
to preach for itself, and France in general simmering under a scum of
impieties, levities, Saint-Simonisms, and frothy fantasticalities of all
kinds, towards the boiling-over which soon made the Three Days of July
famous. But by far the most important foreign home he visited was that
of Coleridge on the Hill of Highgate,--if it were not rather a foreign
shrine and Dodona-Oracle, as he then reckoned,--to which (onwards from
1828, as would appear) he was already an assiduous pilgrim. Concerning
whom, and Sterling's all-important connection with him, there will be
much to say anon.

Here, from this period, is a Letter of Sterling's, which the glimpses
it affords of bright scenes and figures now sunk, so many of them,
sorrowfully to the realm of shadows, will render interesting to some of
my readers. To me on the mere Letter, not on its contents alone, there
is accidentally a kind of fateful stamp. A few months after Charles
Buller's death, while his loss was mourned by many hearts, and to his
poor Mother all light except what hung upon his memory had gone out in
the world, a certain delicate and friendly hand, hoping to give the poor
bereaved lady a good moment, sought out this Letter of Sterling's, one
morning, and called, with intent to read it to her:--alas, the poor lady
had herself fallen suddenly into the languors of death, help of another
grander sort now close at hand; and to her this Letter was never read!

On "Fanny Kemble," it appears, there is an Essay by Sterling in the
_Athenaeum_ of this year: "16th December, 1829." Very laudatory