on my hands some leisure at this time, and being bound to
it by evident considerations, one of which ought to be especially
sacred to me, I decide to fling down on paper some outline of what
my recollections and reflections contain in reference to this most
friendly, bright and beautiful human soul; who walked with me for a
season in this world, and remains to me very memorable while I continue
in it. Gradually, if facts simple enough in themselves can be narrated
as they came to pass, it will be seen what kind of man this was; to what
extent condemnable for imaginary heresy and other crimes, to what
extent laudable and lovable for noble manful _orthodoxy_ and other
virtues;--and whether the lesson his life had to teach us is not much
the reverse of what the Religious Newspapers hitherto educe from it.

Certainly it was not as a "sceptic" that you could define him, whatever
his definition might be. Belief, not doubt, attended him at all points
of his progress; rather a tendency to too hasty and headlong belief.
Of all men he was the least prone to what you could call scepticism:
diseased self-listenings, self-questionings, impotently painful
dubitations, all this fatal nosology of spiritual maladies, so rife
in our day, was eminently foreign to him. Quite on the other side lay
Sterling's faults, such as they were. In fact, you could observe, in
spite of his sleepless intellectual vivacity, he was not properly a
thinker at all; his faculties were of the active, not of the passive or
contemplative sort. A brilliant _improvisatore_; rapid in thought, in
word and in act; everywhere the promptest and least hesitating of men.
I likened him often, in my banterings, to sheet-lightning; and
reproachfully prayed that he would concentrate himself into a bolt, and
rive the mountain-barriers for us, instead of merely playing on them and
irradiating them.

True, he had his "religion" to seek, and painfully shape together for
himself, out of the abysses of conflicting disbelief and sham-belief and
bedlam delusion, now filling the world, as all men of reflection have;
and in this respect too,--more especially as his lot in the battle
appointed for us all was, if you can understand it, victory and not
defeat,--he is an expressive emblem of his time, and an instruction and
possession to his contemporaries. For, I say, it is by no means as a
vanquished _doubter_ that he figures in the memory of those who knew
him; but rather as a victori