"My health goes on most favorably.I have had no attack of the chest this spring;which has not happened to me since the spring before we went to Bonn;and I am told,if I take care,I may roll along for years.But I have little hope of being allowed to spend the four first months of any year in England;and the question will be,Whether to go at once to Italy,by way of Germany and Switzerland,with my family,or to settle with them in England,perhaps at Hastings,and go abroad myself when it may be necessary.I cannot decide till Ireturn;but I think the latter the most probable.
"To my dear Charles I do not like to use the ordinary forms of ending a letter,for they are very inadequate to express my sense of your long and most unvarying kindness;but be assured no one living could say with more sincerity that he is ever affectionately yours,"JOHN STERLING."Other Letters give occasionally views of the shadier side of things:
dark broken weather,in the sky and in the mind;ugly clouds covering one's poor fitful transitory prospect,for a time,as they might well do in Sterling's case.Meanwhile we perceive his literary business is fast developing itself;amid all his confusions,he is never idle long.Some of his best Pieces--the Onyx _Ring_,for one,as we perceive--were written here this winter.Out of the turbid whirlpool of the days he strives assiduously to snatch what he can.
Sterling's communications with _Blackwood's Magazine_had now issued in some open sanction of him by Professor Wilson,the distinguished presiding spirit of that Periodical;a fact naturally of high importance to him under the literary point of view.For Wilson,with his clear flashing eye and great genial heart,had at once recognized Sterling;and lavished stormily,in his wild generous way,torrents of praise on him in the editorial comments:which undoubtedly was one of the gratefulest literary baptisms,by fire or by water,that could befall a soul like Sterling's.He bore it very gently,being indeed past the age to have his head turned by anybody's praises:nor do Ithink the exaggeration that was in these eulogies did him any ill whatever;while surely their generous encouragement did him much good,in his solitary struggle towards new activity under such impediments as his._Laudari a laudato_;to be called noble by one whom you and the world recognize as noble:this great satisfaction,never perhaps in such a degree before or after had now been vouchsafed to Sterling;and was,as I compute,an important fact for him.He proceeded on his pilgrimage with new energy,and felt more and more as if authentically consecrated to the same.
The _Onyx Ring_,a curious Tale,with wild improbable basis,but with a noble glow of coloring and with other high merits in it,a Tale still worth reading,in which,among the imaginary characters,various friends of Sterling's are shadowed forth,not always in the truest manner,came out in _Blackwood_in the winter of this year.Surely a very high talent for painting,both of scenery and persons,is visible in this Fiction;the promise of a Novel such as we have few.But there wants maturing,wants purifying of clear from unclear;--properly there want patience and steady depth.The basis,as we said,is wild and loose;and in the details,lucent often with fine color,and dipt in beautiful sunshine,there are several things mis_seen_,untrue,which is the worst species of mispainting.Witness,as Sterling himself would have by and by admitted,the "empty clockcase"(so we called it)which he has labelled Goethe,--which puts all other untruths in the Piece to silence.
One of the great alleviations of his exile at Madeira he has already celebrated to us:the pleasant circle of society he fell into there.
Great luck,thinks Sterling in this voyage;as indeed there was:but he himself,moreover,was readier than most men to fall into pleasant circles everywhere,being singularly prompt to make the most of any circle.Some of his Madeira acquaintanceships were really good;and one of them,if not more,ripened into comradeship and friendship for him.He says,as we saw,"The chances are,Calvert and I will come home together."Among the English in pursuit of health,or in flight from fatal disease,that winter,was this Dr.Calvert;an excellent ingenious cheery Cumberland gentleman,about Sterling's age,and in a deeper stage of ailment,this not being his first visit to Madeira:he,warmly joining himself to Sterling,as we have seen,was warmly received by him;so that there soon grew a close and free intimacy between them;which for the next three years,till poor Calvert ended his course,was a leading element in the history of both.
Companionship in incurable malady,a touching bond of union,was by no means purely or chiefly a companionship in misery in their case.The sunniest inextinguishable cheerfulness shone,through all manner of clouds,in both.Calvert had been travelling physician in some family of rank,who had rewarded him with a pension,shielding his own ill-health from one sad evil.Being hopelessly gone in pulmonary disorder,he now moved about among friendly climates and places,seeking what alleviation there might be;often spending his summers in the house of a sister in the environs of London;an insatiable rider on his little brown pony;always,wherever you might meet him,one of the cheeriest of men.He had plenty of speculation too,clear glances of all kinds into religious,social,moral concerns;and pleasantly incited Sterling's outpourings on such subjects.He could report of fashionable persons and manners,in a fine human Cumberland manner;loved art,a great collector of drawings;he had endless help and ingenuity;and was in short every way a very human,lovable,good and nimble man,--the laughing blue eyes of him,the clear cheery soul of him,still redolent of the fresh Northern breezes and transparent Mountain streams.With this Calvert,Sterling formed a natural intimacy;and they were to each other a great possession,mutually enlivening many a dark day during the next three years.They did come home together this spring;and subsequently made several of these health-journeys in partnership.