ng;
busy at all hours to perform his part in abundant and superabundant
measure! "Of that which it was to me personally," continues Mr. Hare,
"to have such a fellow-laborer, to live constantly in the freest
communion with such a friend, I cannot speak. He came to me at a time of
heavy affliction, just after I had heard that the Brother, who had
been the sharer of all my thoughts and feelings from childhood, had bid
farewell to his earthly life at Rome; and thus he seemed given to me to
make up in some sort for him whom I had lost. Almost daily did I look
out for his usual hour of coming to me, and watch his tall slender
form walking rapidly across the hill in front of my window; with the
assurance that he was coming to cheer and brighten, to rouse and stir
me, to call me up to some height of feeling, or down to some depth of
thought. His lively spirit, responding instantaneously to every impulse
of Nature and Art; his generous ardor in behalf of whatever is noble and
true; his scorn of all meanness, of all false pretences and conventional
beliefs, softened as it was by compassion for the victims of those
besetting sins of a cultivated age; his never-flagging impetuosity in
pushing onward to some unattained point of duty or of knowledge: all
this, along with his gentle, almost reverential affectionateness towards
his former tutor, rendered my intercourse with him an unspeakable
blessing; and time after time has it seemed to me that his visit had
been like a shower of rain, bringing down freshness and brightness on
a dusty roadside hedge. By him too the recollection of these our daily
meetings was cherished till the last." [11]

There are many poor people still at Herstmonceux who affectionately
remember him: Mr. Hare especially makes mention of one good man there,
in his young days "a poor cobbler," and now advanced to a much
better position, who gratefully ascribes this outward and the other
improvements in his life to Sterling's generous encouragement and
charitable care for him. Such was the curate life at Herstmonceux. So,
in those actual leafy lanes, on the edge of Pevensey Level, in this new
age, did our poor New Paul (on hest of certain oracles) diligently
study to comport himself,--and struggle with all his might _not_ to be a
moonshine shadow of the First Paul.

It was in this summer of 1834,--month of May, shortly after arriving in
London,--that I first saw Sterling's Father. A stout broad gentleman
of sixt