decision in that great moment;--for the rest, that he much wished to
learn reading and writing, and find some way of life above ground

instead of below. By aid of the Misses Fox and the rest of that
family, a subscription (modest _Anti_-Hudson testimonial) was raised

to this Methodist hero: he emerged into daylight with fifty pounds in
his pocket; did strenuously try, for certain months, to learn reading

and writing; found he could not learn those arts or either of them;
took his money and bought cows with it, wedding at the same time some

religious likely milkmaid; and is, last time I heard of him, a
prosperous modest dairyman, thankful for the upper light and safety

from the wrath to come. Sterling had some hand in this affair: but,
as I said, it was the two young ladies of the family that mainly did

it.
In the end of 1841, after many hesitations and revisals, _The

Election_ came out; a tiny Duodecimo without name attached;[24] again
inquiring of the public what its suffrage was; again to little

purpose. My vote had never been loud for this step, but neither was
it quite adverse; and now, in reading the poor little Poem over again,

after ten years' space, I find it, with a touchingmixture of pleasure
and repentance, considerably better than it then seemed to me. My

encouragement, if not to print this poem, yet to proceed with Poetry,
since there was such a resolution for it, might have been a little

more decided!
This is a small Piece, but aims at containing great things; a _multum

in parvo_ after its sort; and is executed here and there with
undeniable success. The style is free and flowing, the rhyme dances

along with a certain joyfultriumph; everything of due brevity withal.
That mixture of mockery on the surface, which finely relieves the real

earnestness within, and flavors even what is not very earnest and
might even be insipid otherwise, is not ill managed: an amalgam

difficult to effect well in writing; nay, impossible in
writing,--unless it stand already done and effected, as a general

fact, in the writer's mind and character; which will betoken a certain
ripeness there.

As I said, great things are intended in this little Piece; the motto
itself foreshadowing them:--

"_Fluellen_. Ancient Pistol, I do partly understand your
meaning.

_Pistol_. Why, then, rejoice therefor."
A stupidcommonplace English Borough has lost its Member suddenly, by

apoplexy or otherwise; resolves, in the usual explosivetemper of
mind, to replace him by one of two others; whereupon strange

stirring-up of rival-attorney and other human interests and
catastrophes. "Frank Vane" (Sterling himself), and "Peter Mogg," the

pattern English blockhead of elections: these are the candidates.
There are, of course, fierce rival attorneys; electors of all creeds

and complexions to be canvassed: a poor stupid Borough thrown all
into red or white heat; into blazing paroxysms of activity and

enthusiasm, which render the inner life of it (and of England and the
world through it) luminously transparent, so to speak;--of which

opportunity our friend and his "Muse" take dexterous advantage, to
delineate the same. His pictures are uncommonly good; brief, joyous,

sometimes conclusively true: in rigorously compressed shape; all is
merry freshness and exuberance: we have leafy summer embowering red

bricks and small human interests, presented as in glowing miniature; a
mock-heroic action fitly interwoven;--and many a clear glance is

carelessly given into the deepest things by the way. Very happy also
is the little love-episode; and the absorption of all the interest

into that, on the part of Frank Vane and of us, when once this gallant
Frank,--having fairly from his barrel-head stated his own (and John

Sterling's) views on the aspects of the world, and of course having
quite broken down with his attorney and his public,--handsomely, by

stratagem, gallops off with the fair Anne; and leaves free field to
Mogg, free field to the Hippopotamus if it like. This portrait of

Mogg may be considered to have merit:--
"Though short of days, how large the mind of man;

A godlike force enclosed within a span!
To climb the skies we spurn our nature's clog,

And toil as Titans to elect a Mogg.
"And who was Mogg? O Muse! the man declare,

How excellent his worth, his parts how rare.
A younger son, he learnt in Oxford's halls

The spheral harmonies of billiard-balls,
Drank, hunted, drove, and hid from Virtue's frown

His venial follies in Decorum's gown.
Too wise to doubt on insufficient cause,

He signed old Cranmer's lore without a pause;
And knew that logic's cunning rules are taught

To guard our creed, and not invigorate thought,--
As those bronze steeds at Venice, kept for pride,

Adorn a Town where not one man can ride.
"From Isis sent with all her loud acclaims,

The Laws he studied on the banks of Thames.
Park, race and play, in his capacious plan,

Combined with Coke to form the finished man,
Until the wig's ambrosial influence shed

Its last full glories on the lawyer's head.
"But vain are mortal schemes. The eldest son

At Harrier Hall had scarce his stud begun,
When Death's pale courser took the Squire away

To lands where never dawns a hunting day:
And so, while Thomas vanished 'mid the fog,

Bright rose the morning-star of Peter Mogg."[25]
And this little picture, in a quite opposite way:--

"Now, in her chamber all alone, the maid
Her polished limbs and shoulders disarrayed;

One little taper gave the only light,
One little mirror caught so dear a sight;

'Mid hangings dusk and shadows wide she stood,
Like some pale Nymph in dark-leafed solitude

Of rocks and gloomy waters all alone,
Where sunshinescarcely breaks on stump or stone

To scare the dreamyvision. Thus did she,
A star in deepest night, intent but free,

Gleam through the eyeless darkness, heeding not
Her beauty's praise, but musing o'er her lot.

"Her garments one by one she laid aside,
And then her knotted hair's long locks untied

With careless hand, and down her cheeks they fell,
And o'er her maiden bosom's blue-veined swell.

The right-hand fingers played amidst her hair,
And with her reverie wandered here and there:

The other hand sustained the only dress
That now but half concealed her loveliness;

And pausing, aimlessly she stood and thought,
In virgin beauty by no fear distraught."

Manifold, and beautiful of their sort, are Anne's musings, in this
interesting attitude, in the summer midnight, in the crisis of her

destiny now near;--at last:--
"But Anne, at last her 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 decisiveaccuracy 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