lentiful communications still left, I remember long
Letters, not now extant, principally addressed to his Wife, of which we
and the circle at Knightsbridge had due perusal, treating with animated
copiousness about all manner of picture-galleries, pictures, statues and
objects of Art at Rome, and on the road to Rome and from it, wheresoever
his course led him into neighborhood of such objects. That was
Sterling's habit. It is expected in this Nineteenth Century that a man
of culture shall understand and worship Art: among the windy gospels
addressed to our poor Century there are few louder than this of
Art;--and if the Century expects that every man shall do his duty,
surely Sterling was not the man to balk it! Various extracts from these
picture-surveys are given in Hare; the others, I suppose, Sterling
himself subsequently destroyed, not valuing them much.

Certainly no stranger could address himself more eagerly to reap what
artistic harvest Rome offers, which is reckoned the peculiar produce
of Rome among cities under the sun; to all galleries, churches, sistine
chapels, ruins, coliseums, and artistic or dilettante shrines he
zealously pilgrimed; and had much to say then and afterwards, and with
real technical and historical knowledge I believe, about the objects of
devotion there. But it often struck me as a question, Whether all this
even to himself was not, more or less, a nebulous kind of element;
prescribed not by Nature and her verities, but by the Century expecting
every man to do his duty? Whether not perhaps, in good part, temporary
dilettante cloudland of our poor Century;--or can it be the real diviner
Pisgah height, and everlasting mount of vision, for man's soul in
any Century? And I think Sterling himself bent towards a negative
conclusion, in the course of years. Certainly, of all subjects this
was the one I cared least to hear even Sterling talk of: indeed it is a
subject on which earnest men, abhorrent of hypocrisy and speech that has
no meaning, are admonished to silence in this sad time, and had better,
in such a Babel as we have got into for the present, "perambulate their
picture-gallery with little or no speech."

Here is another and to me much more earnest kind of "Art," which
renders Rome unique among the cities of the world; of this we will, in
preference; take a glance through Sterling's eyes:--

"January 22d, 1839.--On Friday last there was a great Festival at St.
Peter's; the only one I