ver possessed them more entirely. His illness had latterly
so prostrated him, both in mind and body, that those who most loved him
were most anxious for his departure." There was something touching in
this exit; in the quenching of so kind and bright a little life under
the dark billows of death. To me he left a curious old Print of James
Nayler the Quaker, which I still affectionately preserve.

Sterling, from this greater distance, came perhaps rather seldomer to
London; but we saw him still at moderate intervals; and, through his
family here and other direct and indirect channels, were kept in lively
communication with him. Literature was still his constant pursuit; and,
with encouragement or without, Poetic composition his chosen department
therein. On the ill success of _The Election_, or any ill success with
the world, nobody ever heard him utter the least murmur; condolence upon
that or any such subject might have been a questionable operation, by no
means called for! Nay, my own approval, higher than this of the world,
had been languid, by no means enthusiastic. But our valiant friend took
all quietly; and was not to be repulsed from his Poetics either by the
world's coldness or by mine; he labored at his _Strafford_;--determined
to labor, in all ways, till he felt the end of his tether in this
direction.

He sometimes spoke, with a certain zeal, of my starting a Periodical:
Why not lift up some kind of war-flag against the obese platitudes, and
sickly superstitious aperies and impostures of the time? But I had to
answer, "Who will join it, my friend?" He seemed to say, "I, for one;"
and there was occasionally a transient temptation in the thought, but
transient only. No fighting regiment, with the smallest attempt towards
drill, co-operation, commissariat, or the like unspeakable advantages,
could be raised in Sterling's time or mine; which truly, to honest
fighters, is a rather grievous want. A grievous, but not quite a fatal
one. For, failing this, failing all things and all men, there remains
the solitary battle (and were it by the poorest weapon, the tongue only,
or were it even by wise abstinence and silence and without any weapon),
such as each man for himself can wage while he has life: an indubitable
and infinitely comfortable fact for every man! Said battle shaped itself
for Sterling, as we have long since seen, chiefly in the poetic form, in
the singing or hymning rather than the speaking form; and