ar off and hidden behind deep veils.

Some of Sterling's best Papers from the _Athenaeum_ have been published
by Archdeacon Hare: first-fruits by a young man of twenty-two; crude,
imperfect, yet singularly beautiful and attractive; which will still
testify what high literary promise lay in him. The ruddiest glow of
young enthusiasm, of noble incipient spiritual manhood reigns over them;
once more a divine Universe unveiling itself in gloom and splendor, in
auroral firelight and many-tinted shadow, full of hope and full of awe,
to a young melodious pious heart just arrived upon it. Often enough the
delineation has a certain flowing completeness, not to be expected from
so young an artist; here and there is a decided felicity of insight;
everywhere the point of view adopted is a high and noble one, and the
result worked out a result to be sympathized with, and accepted so far
as it will go. Good reading still, those Papers, for the less-furnished
mind,--thrice-excellent reading compared with what is usually going.
For the rest, a grand melancholy is the prevailing impression they
leave;--partly as if, while the surface was so blooming and opulent,
the heart of them was still vacant, sad and cold. Here is a beautiful
mirage, in the dry wilderness; but you cannot quench your thirst there!
The writer's heart is indeed still too vacant, except of beautiful
shadows and reflexes and resonances; and is far from joyful, though it
wears commonly a smile.

In some of the Greek delineations (_The Lycian Painter_, for example),
we have already noticed a strange opulence of splendor, characterizable
as half-legitimate, half-meretricious,--a splendor hovering between the
raffaelesque and the japannish. What other things Sterling wrote there,
I never knew; nor would he in any mood, in those later days, have told
you, had you asked. This period of his life he always rather accounted,
as the Arabs do the idolatrous times before Mahomet's advent, the
"period of darkness."

CHAPTER VII. REGENT STREET.

On the commercial side the _Athenaeum_ still lacked success; nor was
like to find it under the highly uncommercial management it had now got
into. This, by and by, began to be a serious consideration. For money
is the sinews of Periodical Literature almost as much as of war itself;
without money, and under a constant drain of loss, Periodical Literature
is one of the things that cannot be carried on. In no long time Sterling
began to