mute devotions o'er,
Perceived the feet she had forgot before
Of her too shocking nudity; and shame
Flushed from her heart o'er all the snowy frame:
And, struck from top to toe with burning dread,
She blew the light out, and escaped to bed." [26]

--which also is a very pretty movement.

It must be owned withal, the Piece is crude in parts, and far enough
from perfect. Our good painter has yet several things to learn, and
to unlearn. His brush is not always of the finest; and dashes about,
sometimes, in a recognizably sprawling way: but it hits many a feature
with decisive accuracy and felicity; and on the palette, as usual, lie
the richest colors. A grand merit, too, is the brevity of everything; by
no means a spontaneous, or quite common merit with Sterling.

This new poetic Duodecimo, as the last had done and as the next also
did, met with little or no recognition from the world: which was not
very inexcusable on the world's part; though many a poem with far less
proof of merit than this offers, has run, when the accidents favored it,
through its tens of editions, and raised the writer to the demigods for
a year or two, if not longer. Such as it is, we may take it as marking,
in its small way, in a noticed or unnoticed manner, a new height arrived
at by Sterling in his Poetic course; and almost as vindicating the
determination he had formed to keep climbing by that method. Poor Poem,
or rather Promise of a Poem! In Sterling's brave struggle, this little
_Election_ is the highest point he fairly lived to see attained, and
openly demonstrated in print. His next public adventure in this kind
was of inferior worth; and a third, which had perhaps intrinsically gone
much higher than any of its antecessors, was cut off as a fragment, and
has not hitherto been published. Steady courage is needed on the Poetic
course, as on all courses!--

Shortly after this Publication, in the beginning of 1842, poor Calvert,
long a hopeless sufferer, was delivered by death: Sterling's faithful
fellow-pilgrim could no more attend him in his wayfarings through this
world. The weary and heavy-laden man had borne his burden well. Sterling
says of him to Hare: "Since I wrote last, I have lost Calvert; the
man with whom, of all others, I have been during late years the most
intimate. Simplicity, benevolence, practical good sense and moral
earnestness were his great unfailing characteristics; and no man, I
believe, e