ng the next three years. They did come home together
this spring; and subsequently made several of these health-journeys in
partnership.

CHAPTER VI. LITERATURE: THE STERLING CLUB.

In spite of these wanderings, Sterling's course in life, so far as his
poor life could have any course or aim beyond that of screening itself
from swift death, was getting more and more clear to him; and he pursued
it diligently, in the only way permitted him, by hasty snatches, in
the intervals of continual fluctuation, change of place and other
interruption.

Such, once for all, were the conditions appointed him. And it must be
owned he had, with a most kindly temper, adjusted himself to these; nay
you would have said, he loved them; it was almost as if he would have
chosen them as the suitablest. Such an adaptation was there in him
of volition to necessity:--for indeed they both, if well seen into,
proceeded from one source. Sterling's bodily disease was the expression,
under physical conditions, of the too vehement life which, under the
moral, the intellectual and other aspects, incessantly struggled within
him. Too vehement;--which would have required a frame of oak and iron
to contain it: in a thin though most wiry body of flesh and bone, it
incessantly "wore holes," and so found outlet for itself. He could take
no rest, he had never learned that art; he was, as we often reproached
him, fatally incapable of sitting still. Rapidity, as of pulsing
auroras, as of dancing lightnings: rapidity in all forms characterized
him. This, which was his bane, in many senses, being the real origin of
his disorder, and of such continual necessity to move and change,--was
also his antidote, so far as antidote there might be; enabling him to
love change, and to snatch, as few others could have done, from the
waste chaotic years, all tumbled into ruin by incessant change, what
hours and minutes of available turned up. He had an incredible facility
of labor. He flashed with most piercing glance into a subject; gathered
it up into organic utterability, with truly wonderful despatch,
considering the success and truth attained; and threw it on paper with a
swift felicity, ingenuity, brilliancy and general excellence, of which,
under such conditions of swiftness, I have never seen a parallel.
Essentially an _improviser_ genius; as his Father too was, and of
admirable completeness he too, though under a very different form.

If Sterling has done little