"Mr.James,your New-England friend,was here only for a few days;Isaw 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 Ishould 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 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 valiant simplicity 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 then,such notices of his own feelings and condition as could be addressed to a boy.These Letters,I have lately read:they give,beyond any he has written,a noble image of the intrinsic Sterling;--the same face we had long known;but painted now as on the azure of Eternity,serene,victorious,divinely sad;the dusts and extraneous disfigurements imprinted on it by the world,now washed away.One little Excerpt,not the best,but the fittest for its neighborhood here,will be welcome to the reader:--"_To Master Edward C.Sterling,London_.
"HILLSIDE,VENTNOR,29th June,1844.
"MY DEAR BOY,--We have been going on here as quietly as possible,with no event that I know of.There is nothing except books to occupy me.