project for regenerating human knowledge, &c. &c.; to which I prefixed
my private mark (a blot), thinking that you might be pleased to know

of a fellow-laborer somewhere in Tipperary.
"Your Letter, like the Scriptural oil,--(they had no patent lamps

then, and used the best oil, 7s. per gallon),--has made my face to
shine. There is but one person in the world, I shall not tell you

who, from whom a Letter would give me so much pleasure. It would be
nearly as good at Pekin, in the centre of the most enlightened

Mandarins; but here at Ventnor, where there are few Mandarins and no
enlightenment,--fountains in the wilderness, even were they

miraculous, are nothing compared with your handwriting. Yet it is sad
that you should be so melancholy. I often think that though Mercury

was the pleasanter fellow, and probably the happier, Saturn was the
greater god;--rather cannibal or so, but one excuses it in him, as in

some other heroes one knows of.
"It is, as you say, your destiny to write about Cromwell: and you

will make a book of him, at which the ears of our grandchildren will
tingle;--and as one may hope that the ears of human nature will be

growing longer and longer, the tingling will be proportionately
greater than we are accustomed to. Do what you can, I fear there will

be little gain from the Royalists. There is something very small
about the biggest of them that I have ever fallen in with, unless you

count old Hobbes a Royalist.
"Curious to see that you have them exactly preserved in the Country

Gentlemen of our day; while of the Puritans not a trace remains except
in History. Squirism had already, in that day, become the _caput

mortuum_ that it is now; and has therefore, like other mummies, been
able to last. What was opposed to it was the Life of

Puritanism,--then on the point of disappearing; and it too has left
its mummy at Exeter Hall on the platform and elsewhere. One must go

back to the Middle Ages to see Squirism as rampant and vivacious as
Biblicism was in the Seventeenth Century: and I suppose our modern

Country Gentlemen are about as near to what the old Knights and Barons
were who fought the Crusades, as our modern Evangelicals to the

fellows who sought the Lord by the light of their own pistol-shots.
"Those same Crusades are now pleasant matter for me. You remember, or

perhaps you do not, a thing I once sent you about Coeur-de-Lion. Long
since, I settled to make the Cantos you saw part of a larger Book; and

worked at it, last autumn and winter, till I had a bad illness. I am
now at work on it again; and go full sail, like _my_ hero. There are

six Cantos done, roughly, besides what you saw. I have struck out
most of the absurdest couplets, and given the whole a higher though

still sportive tone. It is becoming a kind of _Odyssey_, with a
laughing and Christian Achilles for hero. One may manage to wrap, in

that chivalrous brocade, many things belonging to our Time, and
capable of interesting it. The thing is not bad; but will require

great labor. Only it is labor that I thoroughly like; and which keeps
the maggots out of one's brain, until their time.

"I have never spoken to you, never been able to speak to you, of the
change in my life,--almost as great, one fancies, as one's own death.

Even now, although it seems as if I had so much to say, I cannot. If
one could imagine--... But it is no use; I cannot write wisely on

this matter. I suppose no human being was ever devoted to another
more entirely than she; and that makes the change not less but more

bearable. It seems as if she could not be gone quite; and that indeed
is my faith.

"Mr. James, your New-England friend, was here only for a few days; I
saw him several times, and liked him. They went, on the 24th of last

month, back to London,--or so purposed,--because there is no pavement
here for him to walk on. I want to know where he is, and thought I

should be able to learn from you. I gave him a Note for Mill, who
perhaps may have seen him. I think this is all at present from,

"Yours,
"JOHN STERLING."

Of his health, all this while, we had heard little definite; and
understood that he was very quiet and careful; in virtue of which

grand improvement we vaguely considered all others would follow. Once
let him learn well to be _slow_ as the common run of men are, would

not all be safe and well? Nor through the winter, or the cold spring
months, did bad news reach us; perhaps less news of any kind than had

been usual, which seemed to indicate a still and wholesome way of life
and work. Not till "April 4th, 1844," did the new alarm occur: again

on some slight accident, the breaking of a blood-vessel; again
prostration under dangerous sickness, from which this time he never

rose.
There had been so many sudden failings and happy risings again in our

poor Sterling's late course of health, we had grown so accustomed to
mingle blame of his impetuosity with pity for his sad overthrows, we

did not for many weeks quite realize to ourselves the stern fact that
here at length had the peculiar fall come upon us,--the last of all

these falls! This brittle life, which had so often held together and
victoriously rallied under pressures and collisions, could not rally

always, and must one time be shivered. It was not till the summer
came and no improvement; and not even then without lingering glimmers

of hope against hope, that I fairly had to own what had now come, what
was now day by day sternly advancing with the steadiness of Time.

From the first, the doctors spoke despondently; and Sterling himself
felt well that there was no longer any chance of life. He had often

said so, in his former illnesses, and thought so, yet always till now
with some tacit grain of counter-hope; he had never clearly felt so as

now: Here _is_ the end; the great change is now here!--Seeing how it
was, then, he earnestly" target="_blank" title="ad.认真地；急切地">earnestly gathered all his strength to do this last act

of his tragedy, as he had striven to do the others, in a pious and
manful manner. As I believe we can say he did; few men in any time

_more_ piously or manfully. For about six months he sat looking
steadfastly, at all moments, into the eyes of Death; he too who had

eyes to _see_ Death and the Terrors and Eternities; and surely it was
with perfect courage and piety, and valiantsimplicity of heart, that

he bore himself, and did and thought and suffered, in this trying
predicament, more terrible than the usual death of men. All strength

left to him he still employed in working: day by day the end came
nearer, but day by day also some new portion of his adjustments was

completed, by some small stage his task was nearer done. His domestic
and other affairs, of all sorts, he settled to the last item. Of his

own Papers he saved a few, giving brief pertinent directions about
them; great quantities, among which a certain Autobiography begun some

years ago at Clifton, he ruthlessly burnt, judging that the best. To
his friends he left messages, memorials of books: I have a _Gough's

Camden_, and other relics, which came to me in that way, and are among
my sacred possessions. The very Letters of his friends he sorted and

returned; had each friend's Letters made into a packet, sealed with
black, and duly addressed for delivery when the time should come.

At an early period of his illness, all visitors had of course been
excluded, except his most intimate ones: before long, so soon as the

end became apparent, he took leave even of his Father, to avoid
excitements and intolerable emotions; and except his Brother and the

Maurices, who were generally about him coming and going, none were
admitted. This latter form of life, I think, continued for above

three months. Men were still working about his grounds, of whom he
took some charge; needful works, great and small, let them not pause

on account of him. He still rose from bed; had still some portion of
his day which he could spend in his Library. Besides business there,

he read a good deal,--earnest books; the Bible, most earnest of books,
his chief favorite. He still even wrote a good deal. To his eldest

Boy, now Mr. Newman's ward, who had been removed to the Maurices'
since the beginning of this illness, he addressed, every day or two,

sometimes daily, for eight or nine weeks, a Letter, of general
paternal advice and exhortation; interspersing sparingly, now and