essayists-a course of reading certainly much more dissipating; or the youth who reads all Bayle's "Dictionary"-a course of reading much more dangerous than the "Edinburgh Review?" Let the boy read at his pleasurethe youth will study, and the man think and act. At Cambridge, Sterling did not greatly distinguish himself, nor did he bear any violent affection to his alma mater. For mathematics he had little taste; the classics he rather relished than thoroughly knew. He early commenced the study of philosophy, deeming it at once the key to a scientific theology and to a lofty literature, although latterly he all but left the cold and perilous crags of speculation for the flowery meadows of poetry and æsthetics. At the feet of Coleridge no one ever sat with a feeling of more entire and childlike submission; the house at Highgate was to him the shrine of a god, and his biographer regrets that he "did not preserve an account of Coleridge's conversations, for he was capable of representing their depth, their ever-varying hues, their sparkling lights, their oceanic ebb and flow." He began soon to empty out his teeming mind, in the forms both of verse and prose. In the course of his short life we find him connected, more or less intimately, with the following periodicals: the "Athenæum," "Blackwood's Magazine," the "Quarterly," and the London and Westminster" Reviews." The "Athenæum," when he and Maurice wrote in it, was not the stale summary of new books and gossip which it has since become; it had still some life, genius, and principle; Shades of the Dead" are valuable as beautiful versions of Coleridge's spoken "Hero-worship." At a peculiarly dull period in the history of "Maga" he appeared, amid a flourish of trumpets, as a "new contributor," and did succeed in shooting a little new blood into her withered veins. In the "Quarterly" he wrote a paper on Tennyson, which was attributed at the time to Henry Nelson Coleridge. Differing as he did in many material points from the new school of Radicals who conducted the "Westminster," he seemed more at home in their company than in that of the knights of the Noctes; and his contributions to their journal are all characteristic. These articles have been reprinted by Dr. Hare, and, along with the poems, his tragedy of "Stafford," a few letters, and other remains, constitute all his written claims to consideration. and his 66 He has certainly in them raised no very great or compact basis for future fame; but we are entitled to adduce, in addition, the testimony of his friends, who all speak with rapture of the possibilities of his mind-of his talent as a debater-and of his ready, vivid, and brilliant talk. In him alone Thomas Carlyle met his conversational match; he alone ventured to face him in single combat, and nothing like their renconters seems to have been witnessed since those of Johnson and Burke. Even in his "Remains" we may find faint yet distinct indications of all the principal features of his intellectual character. These, we think, may be classed under the three general characteristics of sympathy, sincerity, and culture. We do not mean that these sum up the whole of his idiosyncrasy, but simply that they are the qualities which have struck us most forcibly in the perusal of his works. He had, besides, as a writer, a fine inventiveness, a rich and varied stock of figures, a power of arresting and fixing in permanent shapes the thinnest gossamer abstractions, and the command of a diction remarkable more for its copiousness, flexibility, and strength, than for grace, clearness, or felicitous condensation. Perhaps his principal claim to reputation rests on his criticisms, and their power and charm lie in genial and self-forgetting sympathy. It is too customary to speak of this as a subordinate quality in a critic, as a veil over his eyes, and nearly inconsistent with the exercise of analytic sagacity. Those who talk in this manner are not so much guilty of a mistake as of a stupid blunder. Sympathy we regard as closely connected with sight. It is a medium which, like water poured into a bowl, enables you to see objects previously invisible. It, and it alone, opens a window into the breast and the brain of genius, and shows the marvellous processes which are going on within. It is not merely that the heart often sees farther than the intellect, but it is that sympathy cleanses and sharpens even the intellectual eye. Love, and you will understand. Besides, the possession of powerful sympathy with intellect and genius, implies a certain similitude of mind on the part of the sympathizer. The blind cannot sympathize with descriptions of scenery, and the lively motion and music of a mountain-stream sound like a satire to the lame who limp beside it. To feel with, you must always find yourself in, the subject or the person. Adam Smith doubtless was wrong when he explained every moral phenomenon by sympathy; it were a more probable paradox to maintain that a man's intellectual power entirely depends upon the depth, width, and warmth of his sympathies, and that Shakspeare was the greatest of men because he was the widest of sympathizers. Waiving, at this stage of our paper, such speculations, we claim a high place for Sterling, as possessed of catholic and clear-headed sympathy. Merely to copy the names of a few of the characters whom he has analyzed with justice, and praised with generosity, is enough to prove this. He has painted Alexander the Great and Wycliffe, Joan of Arc and Gustavus Adolphus, Milton and Burns, Columbus and Coleridge, Simonides and Carlyle, Napier and Tennyson. We find him, too, on friendly terms at once with "Blackwood's Magazine" and the "Westminster Review;" writing in the "Quarterly," and calling Shelley a "generous, heroic being;" and in his "Tales" and "Apologues" imitating the imaginative peculiarities, now of the Gothic, now of the Grecian, and now of the German school. We love this spirit much, not merely as proclaiming a warm heart, but as evincing a wide, keen, and open intellect. We contrast it favorably with a portion of the very class to whom Sterling belonged, whose fastidiousness is fast becoming frantic, who are loathing literature itself, although it is by it alone that themselves have risen, and whose hasty, splenetic, and contradictory judgments tend to exert a damping and discouraging influence upon youthful aspirants, who will ask, if such authorities tell us that nothing has yet been done, how can we expect ever to do anything? Sterling, on the contrary, loved literature for its own sake, and had a true appreciation of its infinite worth and beauty. He was not like Byron, and one or two others we might name, who looked upon literature partly as a means for gratifying an ambition to which other avenues were closed, and partly as an outlet for the waste energy and superfluous fury of their natures, when their passions had not entirely exhausted them, and who, upon the first disappointment and chagrin, were ready to rush into another field; nor did he resemble a class who have mistaken their profession, and expended powers which might have led them to the highest distinction, in action, in travelling, parliament, or arms, on gaining a dubious literary success, which is despised by themselves; nor did he rank with the men whose love to literature is confined to an appreciation of those who resemble, or who follow their peculiar style. His circumstances saved him from the miserable condition of a hack author, and from all the heart-burnings, jealousies, and disgusts which degrade the noble pursuit of literature in his eyes, and turn the beautiful moon into the clouded lantern of a low, lurid, precarious life. Sterling, in his wide and trembling sympathies with literary excellence, and in his devoted enthusiasm for the varied expressions of the beautiful, as well as in the hectic heat and eagerness of his temperament, bore a striking likeness to Shelley, although possessing a healthier, happier, and better balanced nature. We While freely conceding him such qualities, we protest against some of his critical commissions as well as omissions. We are astonished at his silence in reference to John Foster, whose sturdy genius ought to have been known to him, and whose mind was moving more slowly and uneasily through the same process of speculative change with his own. cannot at all understand his admiration for Montaigne, who appears to have been a very slight sublimation of sensual indifference, and not more honest than the sensual-indifferent wealthy usually are. How grossly unjust he is to Rousseau and Hazlitt, when he calls them " 'declaimers and leaders in rhetorical falsehood!" Grant that Rousseau was personally a poor scrannel, tortuous, and broken pipe, who can deny that a power, call it his genius or his demon, discoursed at times. upon him sweet and powerful music, to which nations listened because they could not refrain, and which no term like rhetoric, or even oratory, nor any inferior to poetry, touching the verge of prophecy, can at all measure? No such utterances have come from Hazlitt, but if he resembled Rousseau in occasional bursts of vanity, he was certainly, on the whole, a sincerer man: he egotizes at his proper cost— his absurdities seem given in on oath. For downright honesty, and for masses of plain sense and native acuteness, we are not afraid to compare and prefer many of his essays to those of the old Gascon, and, with all his faults and deficiencies, his match as a masculine and eloquent critic has yet to be made. What verbose affairs do even Jeffrey's criticisms, when collected, appear beside the lectures of Hazlitt, who often expresses the essence of an author by the scratch of his pen, and settles a literary controversy by an epithet. Initiation into the mysteries of German philosophy and literature produced in Sterling a considerable degree of indifference toward the English classics. To Addison's essays-those cool, clear, whispering leaves of summer, so native and so refreshing-he never alludes, and we cannot conceive him, like Burke, hushing himself to his last slum ber, by hearing read the papers in the | on Shakspeare? or several other portions of "Spectator" on the immortality of the soul. that " ponderous mass of futilities?" or his And against Dr. Johnson he has committed famous lines on Shakspeare? Mark, we are himself in a set attack, of which we must not asserting that all such passages are of speak more particularly. An author of ceAn author of ce- the highest order of philosophical criticism, lebrity maintains that no person can be a man but we are asserting their intrinsic value, and of talent who does not admire " Dr Johnson, their immeasurable superiority to the vague, and that all men of eminent ability do admire empty, pointless, misty, and pseudo-German Without pressing the application of disquisitions which stuff many of our princithis assertion, we do think that those who, in pal magazines and reviews in the present day. the present age, find in him a hero, discover We are not prepared to sacrifice the poorest both candor and penetration-candor to ad- passages in the "Lives of the Poets"-nay, mit and pass by his bulky faults as a writer, not even his notes on Shakspeare, (which and penetration to see his bulky though make Fanny Kemble swear-off the stage,) disguised merits as a writer and a man. For for such a piece of elaborate and recondite one to call him a mere "prejudiced, emphatic idiocy, as recently was permitted to appear in pedant," is simply to write down one's self a celebrated Scottish review, as a paper on an ass. For Coleridge to call him "the Tennyson's "Princess," and was yet not the overrated man of his age," (how could the worst specimen of the kind of criticism reage avoid rating him highly, since he was, ferred to. save Burke, the greatest man it had ?) is for Coleridge to prove himself a privileged person, who said whatever he chose. Sterling's charges may be classified thus: Dr Johnson's productions are "loud and swollen"-he could say nothing of poetry, and has said nothing of Shakspeare "worth listening to"he had no serene joy”—and he wanted it because he had no "capacity for the higher kinds of thought." To the proof: 1st. His language was "loud and swollen." Granted. So is a torrent, or a river in flood. So are Thomson's" Seasons," Young's "Night Thoughts," Schiller's "Robbers," Coleridge's "Hymn to Mont Blanc" and " Religious Musings," Sterling's "Lycian Painter" and "Last of the Giants," all productions of genuine merit and meaning, and yet all stilted either in style or manner, or both. Johnson is often loud, but seldom boss-he can beat the drum, but he can shiver the castle-gate with his axe too. If his arm be sometimes "swollen" with indolence, it is often swollen with heavy blows aimed, and not in vain, at the heads of his enemies. His very yawn is thunder-he swings in an easy chair, which many that mock him could not move. You may laugh at the elephant picking up the pin, but not ejaculating you, brained and battered, toward the skies. 2dly. He has said nothing of Shakspeare or poetry worth listening to. What! Is his dissertation in Waller on sacred poetry, be it true or false, not worth listening to? or his panegyric on the "Paradise Lost?" or his character of the "Night Thoughts?" or his comparison between Pope and Dryden? or his picture of a poet in " Rasselas ?" or his unanswered overturn of the unities in his essay But Sterling accuses Johnson of wanting serene joy;" an accusation, alas! too true. But, how could he have attained this, in the first place, under the pressure of that "vile body"-that huge mass of disease, bad humors, and semi-blindness, which he carried about with him, and under which he struggled and writhed like a giant below Etna ? In the victim of old, yoked consciously to a putrifying carcass, we may conceive stern submission, but hardly serene joy. We can account for a man like William Cobbett, high in health, clear in eye, and with a system answering like the crystal mirror of a stream to every feature of his intellectual faculties, reproaching Johnson with gloom, but must think it a sad mistake, if not an affectation, on the part of a philosophic valetudinarian like John Sterling. Besides, as it has been said that the laws of disease are as beautiful as those of health, the intuitions of disease are as true as those of health. In none of them is the whole truth found; but even as the jaundiced view is only a partial rendering of the creation and of man, so the view of one in perfect health and strength, with a sanguine temperament, and in circumstances of signal prosperity, is equally imperfect. The one may be called a black or yellow, the other a white lie. Surely the Cockney we have elsewhere commemorated as sitting with Carlyle in a railway carriage, rubbing his hands, and saying to the grim stranger-"“Successful world this, isn't it, sir ?" was as far astray as the author of Sartor glaring through the gloomy, bile-spotted splendor of the atmosphere which usually surrounds his spirit. And whether are more trustworthy, the feelings of the man standing before his fire, watching the parturition of a pudding, and the simmering of a pot of mulled porter, and exclaiming, "How comfortable!" or those of a traveller perishing among the midnight snows? There is truth, and equal truth, in all such angular aspects; there is the whole truth in none of them, nor even in any conceivable mixture of them all. And it were difficult to imagine a man in temperament like Johnson forming essentially another view than what rushed in on him from every orifice of his distempered system. regulated physical life will in some measure modify both mental views and mental happiness. But, in the first place, there are constitutions for whom a well-regulated means a generous mode of living. Such was that of Shelley, who, according to the testimony of his friends, was never so well or happy as when at rare intervals he departed from his usual fare of vegetables and water. Secondly, "Because thou art virtuous," is there no more vice in the world, no more misery is every dark problem solved-are the old enigmas of death and sin made one whit plainer? nay, in proportion to the degree of personal purity is not the feeling of sorrow and disgust at the follies and foulnesses of the world likely to gain strength? Ah! the utmost that the cleanest outward life can do is to produce in some minds a feeling that they have evaded, although not met, the grand difficulty, to produce in others a selfish selfcomplacency and forgetfulness, springing from a state of health so unnaturally constant as to be in reality a disease, and on minds of the higher order to produce little permanent effect at all. From another source must help come. From above, from the regions of spiritual truth, must descend that baptism of fire which confers ardent hope, if not happi There is a cant in the present day-a cant which Sterling was above-about health, healthy systems, healthy views, healthy regulation of body, as producing a healthy tone of mind, as if the soul and stomach were identical, as if good digestion were the same thing with happiness, as if all gloomy and distressing thoughts sprung from bile, as if one had only to lie down under the "wet sheet" to understand the origin of evil, to solve all the cognate, tremendous problems of the universe, and to obtain that "reconciliation" after which all earnest spirits aspire. Easy the process now for obtaining the " peace which passeth understanding!" Poor John Bunyan, why didst thou struggle, writhe, and madden, wade through hells of fire and seas of blood, to gain a result to which cold bath-ness-that blessedness which is higher and ing and barks would have led thee in a month? Foolish Thomas Carlyle, why all that pother about everlasting noes and yeas, instead of anticipating Bulwer in the baptismal regeneration of the cold-water cure? This is a free translation of the doctrines propounded by our modern utilitarians, who hold that if they had had Dante and Byron in their hands they would have made them happy men, and writers so sweet and so practical, and who can hardly credit you when you tell them that John Foster observed all the "natural laws," and was a gloomy "son of thunder," and that others break them daily, and are as merry as the day is long. It is vain to speak to them of temperament, of hereditary melancholy, of mental penetration so piercing as to amount to distemper, of visions of evil so vivid as to haunt every movement of the spirit, of hectic sensibility, of doubts so strong as to threaten to strangle piety and render devotion at times a torment-let the man but give up tobacco, and he will and must be happy! Foster evidently did not take enough of exercise, Carlyle smokes, and Cowper went to excess, it is well known, in the "cup that cheers but not inebriates." Hinc ille lachrymæ! Now it is of course conceded that a well better, even in its imperfection and chequered light, than the unthinking calm or mechanical gladness of the best regulated animalism. But Johnson, according to Sterling, wanted serene joy, not merely from the peculiarity of his temperament, nor merely from the state of his age and the degree of his culture as affecting his impressions, but from his incapacity for the higher kinds of thought— as if all possessed of this capacity, as if Coleridge, for instance, or Schiller, or Carlyle, whom Sterling always ranks in the first class, have been serene, and as if this explanation of Johnson's want of peace were not disproved by a hundred instances of men who, less entitled than he to the praise of the highest original or inventive genius-for example, Hall, Southey, Chalmers, and the lately deceased Hamilton of Leeds-have been distinguished by buoyant and child-like felicity. No; we are persuaded that from no defect in Johnson's intellect, but from constitutional causes, sprung his morbid melancholy; nay, that the strength of his intellect was proved by the control which it exercised over his temperament. A giant maniac required and obtained a giant keeper. Had he possessed the culture and shared in the progress of our age, we are not sure if more than three or four of its literary heroes would have overtopped him. Peace to his massive shade! He was one of the best, greatest, wisest, and most sincere of men. You ity of Sterling, his sincerity. Those much abused and desecrated terms, truth-seeker and beauty-lover, assumed too often by the selfish and the vain to distinguish them from While we are engaged in finding fault, we the common crowd, came of their own accord may notice our author's opinions on the and rested on his head. And if he did connection between intellect and heart. Car- seem towards the close to relax somewhat in lyle had maintained that a truly great intellect his devotion to truth, and to be smit with a must always be accompanied by a noble moral fonder affection for the beautiful, it was nature; he had not asserted the converse, because, while the latter melted into his that a noble moral nature implies a great embrace, the former fled ever before him into intellect. Sterling in his reply, commits, we her awful shades. He turned from the think, two mistakes. First, imagining that haughty Rosalind of truth to the fair young Carlyle had asserted this untenable converse, Juliet of beauty. But his love in both inhe presses him with the names of Newton of stances was as pure as it was ardent. Olney, Thomas Scott, Calamy, Swartz, and do not see him in the death-wrestle of Arnold, Jeanie Deans, and asks if these were people who, like Jacob at Peniel, appears panting as of high intellect? But although the day in- he cries to the mysterious form, "I will not cludes the hour, the hour does not include let thee go except thou bless me; rather the day. Carlyle's idea is, that while the crush me by thy weight than tell me nothmoral nature has been found high and the ing." For such painful and protracted strugintellect small, the intellect has never come to gle Sterling was unfitted by temperament its true elevation without the correspondence and by illness; but if not a rugged athlete, of the heart. It is a question of facts. In he was a swift runner in this great chase. the second place, Sterling and Carlyle attach His mind wrought less than Arnold's by redifferent meanings to the word intellect. With search-more by rapid intuition. With less the one it signifies the understanding, and he learning and perseverance, he had incompashows triumphantly how it has wedded wick-rably more imagination and more philosophic edness or heartlessness in Tiberius, the Duke of Guise, Lord Bolingbroke, Voltaire, and Talleyrand. With Carlyle it means the higher power of intuition, genius, or reason, which, according to him, while often attended by a train of error-imps, or even big burly vices, never exhibits profound and radical depravity, and is never unattended by a sense of the good, the true, the generous and the just. It is obviously impossible to settle a controversy where there is a preliminary misunderstanding as to the terms, but we certainly incline to Carlyle's opinion--holding it, however, only as a general rule, and noting two distinct species of exception which we may call the mad and the monstrous case. There is, first, the mad, in which, as with Rousseau, and perhaps Mirabeau and Byron, a diseased organization has divided those principles of head and heart which are usually joined in the marriage chamber of the brain of genius. There is, secondly, the monstrous case, where, as in Bacon, the moral sense, if not omitted entirely, seems to exist in an inverse proportion to the intellectual powerwhere an intellect vast, varied and weighty as the globe is balanced by a heart, hard and small as a pin-point. Ought we to add Napoleon as another instance of this second most rare and appalling formation? We mentioned as the second general qual sagacity. Health and circumstances prevented him from effecting so much as Arnold, or leaving on the age the same impression of fearlessness, truthfulness, and moral power. More than even Arnold was he caught in the meshes of uncertainty, and to both death seemed the dawning of a light which they had yearned after but never reached on earth. Both died too early for the world, but in time for their own happiness. It is clear that Arnold could not have remained much longer connected with the English church, nor probably with any. Whither the restless progress of Sterling's mind would have led him we cannot tell, but it had conducted him to quaking and dangerous ground. Both, while in deep doubt upon many important questions, exhibited on the verge of death a childlike Christianity of spirit and language, which it is delightful to contemplate; and both through their moral likeness to each other, through their position and the progress of their thought, will, notwithstanding many mental dissimilarities, be classed together by posterity as two of the most interesting specimens of the enlightened minds of our strange transition period. Sterling's culture was of a peculiar kind. His mind was not ripened under the stern and scorching sun of science, but under the softer and more genial warmth of philosophy |