in Literature, we may ask, What other man
than he, in such circumstances, could have done anything? In virtue of
these rapid faculties, which otherwise cost him so dear, he has built
together, out of those wavering boiling quicksands of his few later
years, a result which may justly surprise us. There is actually some
result in those poor Two Volumes gathered from him, such as they are; he
that reads there will not wholly lose his time, nor rise with a
malison instead of a blessing on the writer. Here actually is a real
seer-glance, of some compass, into the world of our day; blessed glance,
once more, of an eye that is human; truer than one of a thousand,
and beautifully capable of making others see with it. I have known
considerable temporary reputations gained, considerable piles of
temporary guineas, with loud reviewing and the like to match, on a far
less basis than lies in those two volumes. Those also, I expect, will
be held in memory by the world, one way or other, till the world
has extracted all its benefit from them. Graceful, ingenious and
illuminative reading, of their sort, for all manner of inquiring souls.
A little verdant flowery island of poetic intellect, of melodious
human verity; sunlit island founded on the rocks;--which the enormous
circumambient continents of mown reed-grass and floating lumber, with
_their_ mountain-ranges of ejected stable-litter however alpine, cannot
by any means or chance submerge: nay, I expect, they will not even quite
hide it, this modest little island, from the well-discerning; but will
float past it towards the place appointed for them, and leave said
island standing. _Allah kereem_, say the Arabs! And of the English
also some still know that there is a, difference in the material of
mountains!--

As it is this last little result, the amount of his poor and
ever-interrupted literary labor, that henceforth forms the essential
history of Sterling, we need not dwell at too much length on the foreign
journeys, disanchorings, and nomadic vicissitudes of household, which
occupy his few remaining years, and which are only the disastrous and
accidental arena of this. He had now, excluding his early and more
deliberate residence in the West Indies, made two flights abroad, once
with his family, once without, in search of health. He had two more, in
rapid succession, to make, and many more to meditate; and in the whole
from Bayswater to the end, his family made no fewer than fiv